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THE DANGER ON THE 
DANUBE 


BY 

E, ALEXANDER POWELL 


PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO. 








THE DANGER 
ON THE DANUBE 


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BY 


E. ALEXANDER POWELL 

*1 


PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO. 
NEW YORK * LONDON 















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THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


1* 



INTRODUCTION. 


What chiefly strikes the stranger desirous of 
acquainting himself with the situation that has arisen 
in Central Europe after the conclusion of the war is that 
the great political and economic units betw’^een the Baltic 
and the Mediterranean seas have been broken up and 
their places on the German-Russian frontier, as well as 
in the territories of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, 
taken by smaller units. Whilst within the former political 
formations the most diverse races lived together, the 
result of the war was that new national formations arose: 
The general opinion is that the reason for this change 
was the freeing of oppressed peoples, and that the basis 
upon which the new formations were constructed was 
the principle of self-determination. The superficial ob¬ 
server accepts this, but anyone taking the trouble to 
study the change at close quarters, will certainly not 
receive the impression that liberty has succeeded bondage 
or prosperity stagnation. Rather will he perceive that, 
instead of any solution having been found for the dif-i 
ficulties that weighed upon those great political and 
economic units, a shifting of established frontiers has 
taken place in Central Europe from the Baltic to the 
Mediterranean without the consent of the peoples affected 


I 


INTRODUCTION 


thereby, and that the military preparations necessary to 
the maintenance of these one-sided arrangements have 
brought about a state of affairs that may be described 
as anything rather than settled, and considered as being 
anything rather than the groundwork of a peaceful fu¬ 
ture. The great difference between the situations in 
Western and in Eastern Europe lies in the fact that whereas 
ip the former place the one-sided provisions of the Peace 
Treaties have not been attended by political and economic 
4issolution, the countries lying, on the one hand, between 
Qermany and Italy, and on the other, between Germany 
ppd Russia, as well as the South Eastern part of Europe, 
have become, like a piece of mosaic, and the explosion 
qf the forces called into play in the countries where the 
several minorities are domiciled, has been held in check 
Qlily by the presence of large armies. A closer examination 
will convince the visitor to that region, if he is not pre- 
j>i|ired to accept the material broadcasted by the propa¬ 
ganda organisations of the parties concerned, that the 
pjFOblems of Western politics, no matter how grave and 
important those may be, are neither grave enough nor 
important enough to minimise the gravity and im¬ 
portance of the situation which, in consequence of the 
Peace Treaties, has, in an arbitrary fashion, been created 
and maintained in the Eastern part of Europe. The un- 
pj;e.judiced conclusion arrived at after a personal study 
of; the question must be that the great military prepa¬ 
redness, exceeding by far the arniaments of pre-war 
times, which, is required for the maintenance of the Peace 
Treaties in this part of Europe, is not directed against 


II 


INTRODUCTION 


the fallen nionarehs from whose tyranny the peoples 
had to be freed, but that it is needed to allow of one 
part of the population keeping the other part — more 
than 50 million souls — under alien rule and oppression 
against their will. In other words, oppression and tyranny 
are rife as heretofore, only now, in keeping with the 
spirit of the age, they are masked in the guise of Demo¬ 
cracy. Clearly those great military forces are being held 
in readiness against something; this something, however^ 
as the conquered states are completely disarmed, is 
no longer an inimical army, but the masses of the popu¬ 
lation whose fate was decided, who were driven under 
alien subjection, without their being consulted — the 
people who cannot and will not acquiesce in oppression. 

All praise is due to Mr. E. Alexander Powell who 
visited the frontiers of the several European countries 
at variance with one another and who did his best to 
expose in an unprejudiced way all the difficulties of this 
impossible situation. He is quite right in saying that 
some amelioration of the situation must be found speed¬ 
ily; for the Treaties of Paris, having overthrown the 
great political and economic units, have done nothing 
in the way of construction. What can be upheld only 
by force of arms cannot be stable, but is merely a source 
of further changes. According to the author, change can 
onl}^ then be peaceful if the govemements of the states 
of Western Europe treat seriously of the situation here. 
Otherwise only another war may be expected — a war 
desired by nobody, butwhich may be made unavoidable 
is spite of us, by the oppression of the peoples. 


Ill 


INTRODUCTION 


In the spring of 1927 Mr. E. Alexander Powell made 
a journey of over twelve thousand miles in the East of 
Europe, and in his work entitled “Embattled Borders-' 
gave a faithful picture of the dangerous and unsettled 
situation which he found everywhere from the Adria to 
the Baltic Sea. According to the chapter of that work 
entitled “The Danger on the Danube” the place where 
the fire smoulders is in the heart of Europe, in the Basin 
of the Danube. The peace of Europe and of the whole 
world will not be secure and permanent until that 
smouldering fire is quenched. The key to a solution of 
the situation is in the hands of the English-speaking 
public. When the peoples of Great Britain and America 
will become acquainted with the truth about the situation, 
it is certain they will find some equable solution. 
For this reason it is important that this chapter of Mr. 
E. Alexander Powell’s work should reach the English 
reading public in the form of a separate book. 


IV 



The United States are represented at Belgrade by 
dr. John Dyneley Prince, formerly dean of the Gram¬ 
mar school of Newyork University, who is one of 
the most accomplished lineuists of the world. When 
he learned that I contemplated visiting Yugoslavia 
and Hungary he sent me a letter for presentation to 
the frontier authorities written in Croat by his own 
hand, and on the day of our departure from the Serb 
capital he presented me with a similar document 
written in Serbian. Then, as an afterthought, he dashed 
off a third letter, this time in Hungarian. 

I had been assured in Belgrade that we could quite 
easily reach Budapest in a single day, but darkness 
found us only as far as Zenta, where we spent the 
night in a scrupulously clean little inn ambitiously 
called the Grand Amerika Hotel. The proprietor, a 
naturalized American of Serb origin, told us that his 
wife, whom he had married in Indianapolis and who 
had never been out of the United States, was on her 
way over to join him. I wonder what her feelings 
were when she got her first view of Zenta and the 
Grand Amerika Hotel. 

It was noon of the second day before we reached 
the Hungarian border near Szeged. The formalities 


5 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


involved in getting out of Yugoslavia were such as 
might have been expected on leaving Sing Sing, but 
here they were merely exasperating. We first called 
at the police station in the little border town—I for¬ 
get iis name—to have our passports inspected and 
vis6d; next to the custom-house at the railway sta¬ 
tion, where our identity papers and those connected 
with the car were scrutinized and stamped by an¬ 
other set of officials; then to the headquarters of the 
military police, where a soldier was assigned to 
accompany us to the border itself, two miles beyond 
the town. The officer in command of the frontier 
guard conscientiously went through our papers all 
over again, but, being unable to discover anything 
wrong with them, affixed another stamp and waved 
us on. “Thank God, we’re through at last,” I said 
to myself, and stepped on the accelerator. But my 
self-congratulations were somewhat premature, for 
we had not proceeded half a kilometer when a Serb 
sentry appeared from a thatched hut beside the road 
and halted us with ported rifle. “Passport!” he said 
gruffly, regarding us as suspiciously as though we 
were escaping convicts. We satisfied him of our re¬ 
spectability, however; he swung the road-bar 
upward, and a moment later we ^rolled past a red- 
white-and green striped post and upon Hungarian 
soil. 

There was no sentry in sipht, but a sign in Magyar 
directed us, as nearly as we could decipher it, to^a 
little railway station half a mile away. This proved 


6 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


to be the Hungarian customs. But the solitary sol¬ 
dier in charge was not accustomed to having travel¬ 
ers arrive from the south by motor, and our triptych 
was a profound mystery to him. Fortunately, I re¬ 
membered the letter in Hungarian given me by Dr. 
Prince. It was an open sesame. '‘Go ahead,” said 
the soldier courteously, after he had read it. "This 
says that you are Americans, and that's enough for 
me. Besides, it’s almost dinner time.” 




* 


♦ 


In the Szabadsag T6r in Budapest stands a con¬ 
geries of statuary which, though possessing scant 
artistic merit, is one of the most significant and 
appealing in the world. There are four groups. North, 
East, South, and West. They symbolize the territories— 
comprising more than seven tenths of the country as 
it was before the war—which were detached from 
Hungary by the treaty of Trianon. Just as the emblems 
of mourning which for nearly half a century decked the 
Strasbourg statue in the Place de la Concorde mutely 
testified to France’s grief and irreconcilability over 
the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, so the presence of these 
statues in the heart of the Magyar capital serves as 
a poignant reminder to Hungarians of their lost 
provinces, and keeps alive a determination eventu¬ 
ally to regain them. As long as they stand, there can 
be no genuine peace in central Europe, Hungary will 


7 


THE^DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


smolder with resentment and unrest, the shadow of 
fear will hover over the countries which profited by 
her dismemberment, and the whole valley of the 
Danube will remain a powder magazine. 

It is one of the parodies, as it is one of the para¬ 
doxes, of history that France should have been in¬ 
strumental in inflicting on Hungary a vastly greater 
injustice than she herself suffered by the loss of 
Alsace-Lorraine in 1871; that Italy, six hundred 
thousand of whose sons laid down their lives for the 
redemption of Italia irredenta, should have helped 
to create a Hungaria irredenta; that England, which 
entered the war to restore the independence of Bel¬ 
gium, should have consented to upward of three mil¬ 
lion Hungarians being handed over to alien rule. 
Though it is true that the United States escaped the 
reproach of being a party to the treaty of Trianon 
and concluded a separate peace with Hungary the 
following year, we Americans cannot absolve our¬ 
selves from all responsibility for the wrong that was 
done and the highly dangerous situation which it 
has created. For Hungary capitulated, when not a 
single enemy soldier was on her soil, on the express 
understanding that the terms of peace should be 
based on the “points,” “ends,” and “particulars” 
-—twenty-seven in all—formulated by President 
Wilson. 

' It is true that the refusal of the Senate to ratify 
the treaty of Versailles, inextricably interwoven as 
it was with the covenant of the League of Nations, 


8 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


left the United States without a voice in the councils 
of the allies and enormously weakened America’s 
influence in Europe at a highly critical period in Eu¬ 
ropean affairs. But it is equally true that had Amer¬ 
ica vigorously protested, either through the organs 
of public opinion or through the Government at 
Washington, had she said to the allies and particu¬ 
larly to the representatives of the little parasitic 
nations, ‘‘Hungary is not getting a square deal; the 
promises given her are not being kept; you have 
broken the pledge made to her in the name of the 
allies by President Wilson; in forcing her to accept 
such terms you are mak.ng a mockery of the princi¬ 
ples for which we fought, and sowing the seeds of 
future trouble,” such a protest would have been heeded. 

But it was not made. Our vision was still distorted 
by the passions engendered by the great conflict. 
Our hearing was dulled by the din of the propagan¬ 
dists. In our hearts still lurked a desire for revenge 
on those who had opposed us in the war. “The Hun¬ 
garians fought against us, didn’t they ?’' most 
Americans would have demanded. ‘'They were Ger¬ 
many’s allies, weren’t they? Yes? Very well, then. 
Let them take their medicine. Give them all that is 
coming to them. And let it be good and plenty”. 

In the Grand Trianon at Versailles, on June 4, 
1920, was signed the fourth of a series of pacts 
which, so the victors unctuously proclaimed, were 
designed to right the wrongs of oppressed peoples 
and bring lasting peace to a distracted world. Yet 


9 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


it is difficult for any fair-minded person who is fa¬ 
miliar with the lands and peoples affected by it to 
study that extraordinary document without becom¬ 
ing convinced that it was dictated by motives of 
political expediency, vindictiveness, greed, jealousy, 
and fear. It was called a treaty of peace, yet nearly 
every clause contains the seed of future wars or 
revolutions; it is as packed with potential trouble 
as a case of TNT; it was referred to as a settlement, 
yet it settled nothing. 

By the terms of the treaty of Trianon, Hungary, 
admittedly the least culpable of the enemy states, 
was shorn of approximately seven tenths of her pre¬ 
war area and nearly a third of her Magyar popula¬ 
tion. In other words, 90,000 square miles of territory 
and close to 3,000,000 people of Hungarian blood 
were apportioned between Czechoslovakia, Ru¬ 
mania, Yugoslavia, and Austria as a pie might be 
divided among a gang of hungry boys. Yet before 
Congress, on February 11, 1918, President Wilson 
had solemnly declared that ‘‘peoples and provinces 
are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to 
sovereignty, as if they were chattels or pawns in a 
game,” and followed it up with the further declara¬ 
tion, on July 4 of the same year, that the ends for 
which the associated peoples of the world were fight¬ 
ing included “the settlement of every question, 
whether of territory or of sovereignty, of economic 
arrangement or of political relationship, upon the 
basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by 


10 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


the people immediately concerned, and not upon the 
basis of the material interest or advantage of any 
other nation or people which may desire a different 
settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence 
or mastery.” 

“The Treaty” [of Trianon], to quote the Encyclo¬ 
paedia Britannica, a publication which cannot be 
charged with a bias in favor of the central powers, 
“took from Hungary all her gold, silver, copper, salt 
and mercury mines; all but one of her iron mines; 
her largest and best collieries; and 867o of her for¬ 
ests. The only branch of productive territory of 
which she retained over half is viticulture (687o) ” 
It might have been added, with equal truth, that the 
treaty also took from her the whole of her seaboard, 
a great part of her inland waterways, most of her 
railways, all save a negligible fraction of her mer¬ 
chant marine, her most important industrial cities, 
and her richest wheat-growing plains As though 
this were not enough, the small mutilated trunk 
(constituting only 28 per cent of the original king¬ 
dom) was saddled with 46 per cent, of the whole for¬ 
eign debt of the prosperous pre-war country, and, 
in addition, an undefined burden of reparations. 
One wonders why the treaty-makers stopped where 
they did—why they did not carry the job through to 
its logical conclusion and wipe Hungary off the map 
altogether by some partition such as that perpe¬ 
trated at the Congress of Vienna which extinguished 
Poland for a time. 


11 


THE DINGER ON THE DANUBE 


Such, then, were the penalties imposed upon a 
country whose Government entered the war under 
protest, the Hungarian prime minister. Count Ste¬ 
phen Tisza, being the only person present at the 
fateful crown councils held at Vienna in July, 1914, 
who had the courage to oppose the attack on Ser¬ 
bia And it was the same great statesman who, once 
war had been declared, strenuously opposed the in¬ 
troduction of unlimited submarine warfare and 
Germany’s schemes for territorial aggrandizement. 
Such was the ungenerous treatment accorded to the 
only one of the enemy states which emerged from 
the conflict with a record unsullied by cruelties, ex¬ 
cesses, or breaches of international law, it being 
generally admitted that of all the soldiers of the 
central powers the Hungarians were the cleanest 
fighters. 

Seeing that historical obligations were repeatedly 
advanced as pretexts for the final unjust settlement, 
I may be permitted to remind my readers that Eu¬ 
rope owes a twofold debt of gratitude to Hungjry. 
In the tenth century Hungary was the bulwark of 
Europe against Asiatic invasion, the great champion 
of the Cross against the Crescent; and in 1919 Hun¬ 
gary again saved Europe, this time from an even 
greater peril, by overthrowing the Communist re¬ 
gime established by the Reds under B6Ja Kun. Yet 
the nations which she had saved in turn from the 
Turk and the Bolshevist repaid her with dismember¬ 
ment, impoverishment, and humiliation. How, it may 


12 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 

be asked, can the treaty-makers reconcile the policy 
which they pursued at the Trianon in 1920 with their 
attitude in 1922 at Lausanne, when they abjectly 
accepted the terms dictated by the Turks, whose 
hands were still reddened with the blood of slaugh¬ 
tered Christians? 

While we are discussing the subject, it can do 
no harm to recall the fact that Hungary may be said 
to have been only technically at war with the United 
States and England, and that toward them she 
showed her good feelings by refusing to intern her 
American and British residents, who were per¬ 
mitted to continue their usual occupations. An illus¬ 
tration of this friendly tolerance toward the na¬ 
tionals of two nations which the Hungarians have 
always admired is provided by the story told me by 
an English trainer of race-horses whom I met in 
southern Hungary shortly after the armistice. He 
told me that whenever the news of an allied victory 
leaked through, he and his friends celebrated the 
event at one of the leading restaurants of Budapest. 
The table was decked with the Hags of the allies 
and patriotic toasts were drunk without evokirg 
anything more than an occasional jesting reproof 
from their acquaintances among the clientele of the 
establishment. Had a group of Hungarians in New 
York or London attempted to celebrate a victory of 
the central powers in similar fashion they would 
have been mobbed, if notaing worse. 

Who were the receivers of the loot apportioned 


18 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


at Trianon? You will find their identity unflatter- 
ingly but unmistakably indicated by those groups 
of statuary in the Szabadsdg T6r which I have al¬ 
ready mentioned. 

That Serbia, one of the greatest sufferers by the 
war, should be recompensed for her losses was emi¬ 
nently right and proper. To the Serbs Hungary was 
compelled to cede the provinces of Croatia and Sla¬ 
vonia, with their overwhelmingly Slavic populations, 
which was essentially just; and also, which was not 
just, the Voivodina, in Hungary proper, with nearly 
half a million Magyars. It might be mentioned, inciden¬ 
tally, that the Croats and Slovenes do not appear to be 
getting along any better under Serb rule than they 
did under Hungarian, having, as their leaders assert, 
merely exchanged one tyranny for another. The wes¬ 
tern Slavs have always been an unruly and conientious 
people, however, and Hungary, I imagine, is secretly 
rather glad to be rid of them. 

The greatest beneficiary by Hungary’s dismem¬ 
berment was Rumania, which was awarded the whole 
of Transylvania, a province enormous.y rich in 
minerals and forests; nearly all of the Bdndt, which 
is a fertile and highly cultivated agricultural coun¬ 
try ; and a broad stretch of the wheat growing Hun¬ 
garian plain, the annexed territories having a 
Magyar population of 1,650,000. This, with the Aus¬ 
trian province of the Bukovina, was the price which 
the allies, by one of their numerous secret treaties, 
agreed in 1916 to pay Rumania in return for an im- 


14 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 

mediate declaration of war. It is true that the Ru¬ 
manian army promptly ran away, and that during 
the remaining years of the war Rumania was more 
of a liability than an asset to the allied cause, but 
the allies had made the bargain and they stuck to it. 

It is far more difficult to justify the transfers of 
territory on the north, where the all-of-a-sudden 
republic of Czechoslovakia was permitted to annex 
Carpathian Ruthenia and Hungarian Slovakia, the 
latter province having a million Magyar inhabitants. 
The excuses advanced by the treaty-makers for their 
excessive generosity to Rumania cannot be applied 
to the Czechoslovak transaction—first, because the 
Magyars of Slovakia live in solid blocks along the 
Hungarian border instead of being intermingled 
with other nationalities as is the case in Transyl¬ 
vania ; and, secondly, because the Entente was under 
no obligations to the hyphenate state which they had 
created, save perhaps for the handful of Czech “le¬ 
gionaries” who deserted to the allies. The chief 
claim of the Czechs to allied gratitude is that they 
were thoroughly disloyal to their own side. As lor 
the Slovaks, they have no claim at all, for it is to 
their everlasting credit that they refused to turn 
traitors and fought gallantly on the side of the cen¬ 
tral powers to the end. 

The most astounding and incomprehensible of all 
the decisions made by the Trianon treaty-makers, 
however, was the allotment to Austria of the Bur- 
genland, a long and very narrow strip of territory in 

ir» 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


western Hungary with about 90,0^0 Magyar inhabi¬ 
tants. Just why Aust ia, which was as much an 
enemy nation as Hungary and infinitely more cul¬ 
pable, should have been thus rewarded is a question 
for which no one seems to have a very convincing 
answer. There must be reasons for everything that 
happens, outside of lunatic asylums, as Mr. George 
Birmingham pithily remarks, but it is sometimes 
very hard to find them. 

If the allies were really sincere in their protesta¬ 
tions that they wished to deal fairly by the minori¬ 
ties, if they were working for the greatest good of 
the peoples of central Europe, with no thought of 
political expediency or revenge, why, it may perti¬ 
nently be asked, were Hungary’s repeated appeals 
for plebiscites refused in every instance save one, 
and that an insignificant one ? A series of plebiscites 
would at least have given the peoples directly af¬ 
fected by the treaty opportunities to express their 
own preferences as to what should become of them, 
which ought to have counted for something. If, on 
the other hand, a plebiscite is not a satisfactory 
method of settling such problems, as some claim, 
then why, pray, were plebiscites held in Schleswig, 
Luxemburg, Klagenfurt, Allenstein, in Transcau¬ 
casia even? Why were the Turks promised a plebi¬ 
scite in Thrace and the Hungar.ans refused one in 
Transylvania ? Why is the sovereignty of the Saar to 
be setded by plebiscite in 1935 and that of Upper 
Silesia determined by the same method the year.ol- 


16 


1 



THE STEWARD OF THE ('ROWX OF ST. STEPHEN 
ADAIIRAE NICHOLAS HORTHV, REGENT OF HUNGARY 

This sailor-statesman has led his country through difficulties such as few 
men in history have been called upon to face. 'I'he Hungarians might go much 
further and do much worse than to choose him to occupy their empty throne 



















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THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


lowing? These are embarrassing questions, but the 
public has a right to ask them. 

Of course, those who were behind the scenes dur¬ 
ing the treaty-making at the Trianon know the 
answer. The nations of the Little Entente—Czecho¬ 
slovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia—didn’t dare to sub¬ 
mit their claims to plebiscitary decisions because 
they knew that they would lose. Because France des¬ 
perately needed the aid of the Little Entente nations 
for carrying out her coercive schemes against a re¬ 
calcitrant Germany she supported them in their re¬ 
fusal to permit plebiscites in the debated regions. 
England, though secretly disgusted with the whole 
sorry business, found it inexpedient to oppose 
France on a question which did not, after all, di¬ 
rectly affect her own interests, particularly as she 
foresaw fiie need of French support against Tur¬ 
key. And Italy, which had just annexed against their 
wishes 280,000 German Austrians in South Tyrol 
and 230,000 Yugoslavs in the Veneto, could hardly 
have been expected to look with favor on a scheme 
of self-determination which might set an embarrass¬ 
ing precedent. 

The case presented by the Hungarians was so 
strong, however, there was so much danger of the 
public having its eyes opened to the truth of the 
situation, so much fear of a revulsion of public 
opinion, that the chairman of the conference, M. Mil- 
lerand, then prime minister of France, sought to 
smooth matters over for the time being by promis* 


17 


2 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


ing Hungary in the name of the allied powers that, 
if it was found that the new frontiers involved any 
economic or ethnical injustice, she could appeal to 
the League of Nations. Thereupon the Council of 
Ambassadors, which always knew on which side its 
bread was buttered and which always had the final 
say, announced that any alteration of the frontiers 
as fixed by the treaty, however slight, would consti¬ 
tute a breach of the treaty, and therefore could not 
be permitted. I ask you now, in all seriousness, if a 
more fantastic or asinine situation can be found out¬ 
side the pages of ‘‘Alice in Wonderland.” 

I shall be pardoned, I trust, if at this point I di¬ 
gress from my narrative long enough to give an out¬ 
line—I shall endeavor to sketch it in a few broad 
strokes—of the momentous events which occurred in 
Hungary during the period between the armistice 
and the signing of the peace treaty, for a knowledge 
of these events is essential if one is to view in its 
true perspective what happened at the Trianon or 
what is happening in the valley of the Danube 
to-day. 

After the death in November, 1916, of Francis 
Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, 
that curious political and ethnical mosaic known as 
the Dual Monarchy began rapidly to crumble. Aus¬ 
tria was already weak; and the abrupt dismissal by 
the young Emperor Caarles of the Hungarian prime 
minister, Count Stephen Tisza, oroke one of the few 
ties by which the two nations were still united. The 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


protracted war had become extremely and increas¬ 
ingly unpopular in Hungary, the publication in 
January, 1918, of President Wil on’s fourteen 
points, which were accepted with implicit faith by 
the Hungarian people, contributing to the general 
desire for peace. The sufferings and privations 
caused by the blockade had not only encouraged the 
defeatist propaganda; they had paved the way for 
the spread of communistic ideas brought home by 
the great numbers of Hungarian soldiers released 
from Russian prison camps after the treaty of 
Brest-Litovsk. 

On October 25, 1918, the extreme left wing of the 
radicals and Socialists sympathetic to bolshevism 
formed the so-called National Council under the 
presidency of Count Michael Kdrolyi, a nobleman 
of distinguished family but of the most dubious 
reputation, The proclamations issued by the Na¬ 
tional Council foreshadowed the coming of bolshe¬ 
vism, and within less than a week Budapest was 
completely in the hands of the revolutionaries. On 
October 31 KArolyi was named prime minister, and 
the same afternoon his bitterest enemv. Count Tisza, 
the strong man of Hungary and one of the ablest 
statesmen in Europe, was murdered by emissaries 
of the council in his own drawing-room in the pres¬ 
ence of his family. 

At Villa Giusti, near Padua, on November 3, the 
armistice between the Austro-Hungarian and Ital¬ 
ian armies was signed. A line of demarcation was 


19 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


drawn in the southwest; elsewhere the old political 
frontier remained unchanged. But Kdrolyi, believ¬ 
ing that he could obtain better terms from the En¬ 
tente, hastened to Belgrade, where, on November 13, 
he concluded a separate convention with General 
Franchet d’Esperey. The terms stipulated by the 
French commander were far more onerous, how¬ 
ever, than those granted by the Italians, the new 
line of demarcation being well within the old fron¬ 
tier. It was provided that, though the Hungarian 
troops were to withdraw behind this line, Hungarian 
civil control should continue to function in the evacu¬ 
ated territories, but before the ink in which it was 
written was fairly dry the agreement was broken. 
Hungarian officials were removed wholesale, the 
Hungarian police and gendarmerie disarmed, com¬ 
munications interrupted, and the inhabitants of the 
occupied regions forced to take oaths of allegiance 
to Yugoslavia, Rumania, or Czechoslovakia, as the 
case might be, many of them even being pressed into 
the military service of those countries. Even at this 
early stage Hungary’s enemies made it amply clear 
that she had no rights which they felt bound to re¬ 
spect, that they had no intention of keeping the 
pledges made her unless it suited their plans to do so. 

The thirteenth of November is a tragic date in 
Hungarian history, for on that day came from Bel¬ 
grade the news of Karolyi’s failure to obtain even 
moderately lenient terms from the allies, while from 
Vienna was flashed a message that the imperial Gov- 


20 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


eminent had completely collapsed and that the Em¬ 
peror Charles had announced his abdication. The 
country was bewildered, stunned. Utterly disheart¬ 
ened, the people lapsed into a state of apathetic 
resignation. So there was virtually no protest when, 
at a mass meeting held in Budapest by the commu¬ 
nistic elements, the Karolyi gevernment, without 
consulting Parliament, proclaimed Hungary a re¬ 
public and Michael Karolyi its president. 

There now appeared upon the Hungarian stage 
a peculiarly sinister figure in the person of a young 
Jew, born in northern Hungary, named B41a Kun. 
You will picture him as a plump, rather dapper little 
man, with a head too large for his body, a sensuous 
mouth, an overprominent nose, and bright, shifting 
eyes. A lawyer by profession and a journalist by 
avocation, he had obtained a commission in the army 
—he commanded a supply train—was captured by 
the Russians early in the war, was in Russia at the 
time of the revolution, and became an apostle of 
bolshevism among the Hungarian prsoners of war. 
His peculiar talents were appreciated by Lenin, who, 
providing him with a forged passport, sent him back 
to Hungary disguised as a Red Cross doctor. Amply 
supplied with money by Moscow, ho betook himself 
to Budapest, where he promptly set about the task 
which had been assigned him of upsetting the estab¬ 
lished order. He considered himself Lenin’s viceroy 
in central Europe and held long daily conversations 
by wireless with his master. As the result of a con- 


21 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


flict with the police, Kun was wounded and in prison 
when the Karolyi cabinet, as a protest against the 
harsh conditions imposed by the allies, handed over 
to him the reins of government. That Karolyi, whose 
family stands for all that is best in Hungary, should 
have deliberately betrayed his already distracted 
country to the Reds, explains w'hy he is held in loath¬ 
ing and contempt by all decent Hungarians. 

Now the Reds were in undisputed control of the 
Hungarian capital. The streets were patrolled by 
bands of armed Communists. The prisons were emp¬ 
tied, notorious criminals being turned loose to prey 
upon the helpless people. Suffrage was denied to 
priests, lunatics, and employers of labor. Private 
property was confiscated. Private houses and apart¬ 
ments were commandeered. The deposits intrusted 
to the banks were seized and communized. Foreign 
loans were repudiated. A force of Red guards was 
organized. The opponents of communism were per¬ 
secuted, terrorized, tortured, murdered. Hundreds of 
innocent persons were shot or hung. For nineteen 
weeks the specter of fear stalked the streets of the 
Magyar capital. 

It was the sturdy peasantry of the Hungarian 
plain who broke the power of bolshevism in central 
Europe. Kun had planned to convert them to bol¬ 
shevism by force of arms, but the obstinate peasants 
remained as deaf to his threats as to his arguments. 
They stubbornly refused to exchange their wheat 
and potatoes for the paper money printed by the 


22 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


Bo'sheviki, nor could the reign of terror which the 
Red leader instituted in the provinces make them 
change their minds. For these Magyars were folk of 
quite a different temper from the servile Russian 
muzhiks who had obeyed so blindly the orders of 
Lenin. They could be neither cajoled nor coerced. 
They merely sat tight, defied the Bolsheviki to do 
their worst, and waited in stolid patience for the 
good old days to come again. Meanwhile, Budapest 
with its million inhabitants was starving. 

Bolshevist rule in Hungary collapsed so suddenly 
and amid such confusion that it is very difficult to 
determine just what happened. But one or two 
things stand out clearly. When the allies halted 
Kun’s advance against the Czechs, and his forces in 
the south were driven back by the Rumanians, the 
dictator found himself in a desperate position, for he 
could no longer appeal to the distracted country on 
the grounds of nationalism. Moreover, the peasants 
were in an ugly mood and it was known that the 
best elements in the country were secretly organiz¬ 
ing a counter-revolution. So, when word came that 
a Rumanian army had crossed the Tisza, Kun real¬ 
ized that his day was over and that his only hope 
of safety lay in flight. He made his escape to Vienna 
in a special train. Here he was locked up in the local 
lunatic asylum, but after an attempt had been made 
to rid the world of him by sending him poisoned 
Easter eggs—the laudable attempt failed because, 
being a Jew, he did not observe Easter—he was 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


shipped to Russia, where his fellow-Bolsheviki ac¬ 
claimed him a hero and a martyr. 

The restoration of a stable regime in Hungary 
proved extremely difficult owing to the attitude of 
the allies, particularly the Rumanians, the latter 
welcoming if not actually encouraging anarchy in 
the country because it provided them with a pre¬ 
text for armed intervention, which, they hoped, 
might be prolonged into a permanent occupation. 

In May, 1919, a counter-revolutionary government, 
which represented the best elements of the coun¬ 
try, had been organized at Arad—already occupied 
by the Rumanians—under the presidency of Count 
Julius Kdrolyi, who should under no circumstances 
be confused with his cousin Michael. After a few 
days, however, the Rumanians sent the members of 
this government under military escort to Szeged, 
then occupied by French troops. After the flight of 
B61a Kun and the fall of the Commune the provi¬ 
sional government again moved its quarters, this 
time to the shores of Lake Balaton. Here the organi¬ 
zation of a national army was intrusted to Admiral 
Nicholas Horthy, who had been the commander of 
the Austro-Hungarian fleet during the latter part of 
the war and had become a national hero as a result 
of his brilliant naval exploits in the Adriatic. 

In Budapest, meanwhile, the popular Archduke 
Joseph had assumed the reins of government, but 
the Supreme Council in Paris refused to recognize 
any Habsburg in a position of authority in Hun- 


24 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


gary. Things were in such a chaotic state, however, 
in Budapest, which had been occupied by the Ru¬ 
manians, that the Council, becoming seriously 
alarmed, hastily despatched to that city four gen¬ 
erals—an American, an Englishman, a Frenchman, 
and an Italian. The four generals found themselves 
fully occupied in thwarting the excesses of the Ru¬ 
manians, who had literally run amack, plundering 
state buildings and private residences alike and de¬ 
stroying wholesale such property as they were un¬ 
able to ship out of the country. Every telephone 
instrument in the city was confiscated, plumbing fix¬ 
tures were ripped out, delicate scientific instruments 
were taken from the government laboratories and 
then allowed to rust because the Rumanians did not 
know how to use them; furniture, tapestries, silver¬ 
ware, motor-cars, live stock, agricultural imple¬ 
ments, machinery of all sorts were shipped to 
Rumania by the train-load, the value of the goods 
thus “requisitioned,“ according to a report sent to 
Paris by Colonel Loree, totaling nearly twenty 
millions of dollars. And this, mind you, when the war 
had been over for upward of nine months! 

The Rumanians also attempted to loot the state 
museums, with their priceless art treasures, his¬ 
torical manuscripts, and scientific collections, but 
they were foiled in this by the energy and courage 
of General H. H. Bandhoitz, the American member 
of the allied military commission. When word was 
brought to the fiery little general that the Rumanians 


25 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


were pillaging the National Museum he jumped into 
his car, accompanied by a single aide, and drove at 
top speed to the museum. Backed up before the en¬ 
trance was a row of army camions which Rumanian 
soldiers, under the direction of their officers, were 
loading with plunder. When General Bandholtz ar¬ 
rived on the scene they were carrying out a collec¬ 
tion of stuffed birds! Armed only with a riding-crop, 
the American drove the looters out of the building, 
locked and sealed the doors, and sent word to the 
Rumanian commander that he would be held person¬ 
ally responsible by the allied commission for any 
further plundering. 

So gross were the excesses committed by the Ru¬ 
manians during their occupation of Budapest that 
Herbert Hoover, as chairman of the American Relief 
Administration, telegraphed to the Bucharest Gov¬ 
ernment that he would discontinue all shipments of 
food supplies into Rumania unless the outrages im¬ 
mediately ceased. And the Rumanians, who had de¬ 
fied the Supreme Council with impunity, realized 
that it was not safe to disobey Hoover. It so hap¬ 
pened that I was the guest of the late King Ferdi¬ 
nand at the castle of Pelesch in the Carpathians 
when this ultimatum was received. It is character¬ 
istic of the workings of the Rumanian mind that the 
king, ordinarily the quietest of men, became violently 
angry, accusing Mr. Hoover of attempting to coerce 
Rumania, under threat of starvation, into granting 
valuable oil concessions to certain American oil com- 


26 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


panies in which, so the king alleged, the American 
food administrator was financially interested! 

On November 14, 1919, the Rumanians, yielding 
to allied pressure, sullenly withdrew to the line of 
the Tisza, and Horthy rode into Budapest at the 
head of the small national army amid the frenzied 
cheers of the citizens. General elections were held 
in the following January; the new National Assem¬ 
bly restored and put into force the ancient constitu¬ 
tion, and, the question of a king still being in 
abeyance, elected Horthy regent of Hungary unani¬ 
mously and by acclamation. 

Owing to the chaotic condition in which Hungary 
had been ever since the armistice, to the two revolu¬ 
tions, the Rumanian invasion, and the lack of any 
stable or responsible government, it was not until 
January, 1920, that the Hungarian peace delegation, 
headed by Count Albert Apponyi, Count Paul Teleki, 
and Count Stephen Bethlen, arrived in Paris. 

Now, in partial explanation of what followed, it 
must be kept in mind that the Hungarians were late 
in coming to the peace table. The treaty with Ger¬ 
many had been signed at Versailles in the summer of 
1919; the pact with Austria at St. Germain in Oc¬ 
tober; and that with Bulgaria at Neuilly in Novem¬ 
ber. The task involved in these three settlements had 
been a prodigious one, and before the arrival of the 
Hungarian delegates the principal allied statesmen 
had taken their departure, for their powers of per¬ 
sonal application were exhausted and the domestic 


TEnS DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


affairs of their own countries urgently demanded 
their attention. President Wilson had long since 
hastened back to America to plead unavailingly the 
cause of the League of Nations. Lloyd George had 
returned to England to face a hostile Parliament and 
a discontented nation. Clemenceau, his government 
fallen, had sailed for India to seek relaxation in 
tiger-shooting. Orlando, discredited by the Fascisti, 
was living in semi-obscurity in Rome. 

The withdrawal of the Big Four had left the draft¬ 
ing of the peace treaties with Germany’s allies to 
the subordinate members of the allied delegations, 
and these substitutes were not strong enough to exer¬ 
cise anything like the authority and moderating in¬ 
fluence which their predecessors had done. Moreover, 
though only half the work of restoring a lasting 
peace to Europe had been performed, the world’s in¬ 
terest in peace making had evaporated and the spot¬ 
light of publicity which had been focused continu¬ 
ously on Versailles rested only spasmodically on the 
Trianon, where the treaty with Hungary was drafted 
behind closed doors and signed amid general indif¬ 
ference on the part of the peoples of America and 
western Europe. 

But there was no indifference on the part of those 
various minor nationalities which had asserted them¬ 
selves since the war and stood to profit enormously 
from the settlements thus obscurely made. The rever¬ 
berations ot the last gun had scarcely died away be¬ 
fore the spokesmen of all the little peoples of east- 


28 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


ern Europe were awing, flitting toward Paris like 
vultures which scent a dying animal from afar. Here 
came Bratianu with his black beard and bullying 
roar; the venerable Pasic, acquisitive and uncom¬ 
promising; Benes of the boyiah face and the subtle 
mind, together with a horde of advisers, experts, 
secretaries, pamphleteers, and professional propa¬ 
gandists. Even the ubiquitous Queen Marie hastened 
up from Bucharest to lend the aid of her persuasive¬ 
ness and charm. Tons of propaganda were printed 
and distributed; newspapers were subsidized; for¬ 
eign publicists and public men who had an eye out 
for the main chance were bought up—or bought off 
—with money or decorations. Every conceivable in¬ 
terpretation was given to President Wilson’s ^le- 
brated reference to “self-determination"; the theme 
was played continuously, with every sort of varia¬ 
tion. 

They knew exactly what they wanted, these special 
pleaders from beyond the Danube, and to gain their 
ends they utilized every means, played on every emo¬ 
tion, pulled every string. It was more like a rush of 
homesteaders to stake out claims on public lands 
than an orderly and equitable settlement of a prob¬ 
lem which vitally affected the future peace of the 
world and the welfare of millions of human beings. 
No wonder that the neutral nations looked on with 
mingled astonishment and cynicism. It was an amaz¬ 
ing spectacle—and a sorry one. 

This was how grave abuses, containing the sure 


29 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


seed of future wars, crept into the central European 
peace settlement. The surprising thing, indeed, when 
one recalls the apathy of the allies and the contempt 
shown for the lessons of history by the allied nego¬ 
tiators, is not that Hungary’s enemies obtained so 
much, but that they did not obtain more. Had their 
original demands oeen agreed to, there would prob¬ 
ably be no such country as Hungary on the map of 
Europe to-day. Rumania, for example, insisted that 
she be permitted to push her frontier as far west¬ 
ward as the Tisza. Yugoslavia laid claim to the im¬ 
portant industrial city of Szeged with its adjacent 
territory and to P4cs with its valuable coal mines. 
And the Czechs and Yugoslavs jointly urged that 
th^r countries be connected by transforming a strip 
of territory running along the entire western fron¬ 
tier of Hungary into a ‘‘Slav corridor.” Though 
these preposterous claims were not allowed, the ces¬ 
sions of Hungarian territory made to the neighbor¬ 
ing states exceeded their wildest expectations. 

The irresponsible and unintelligent fashion in 
which the new boundaries were drawn and a brand- 
new map of central Europe substituted almost over¬ 
night for the slow growth of centuries is illustiated 
by a story told me by a well-known English 
diplomat who was attached to the British peace 
delegation at the Trianon. While the question of 
the delimitation of Hungary’s eastern frontier 
was under discussion, an English traveler, re¬ 
garded as something of an authority on central 


30 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


European affairs, happened to drop into the 
conference room, whereupon he was invited to ex¬ 
press his opinion. Being in a hurry to keep a 
luncheon engagement, he paused only long enough to 
pick up a pencil and on the map which was spread 
upon the table to roughly sketch a line. ‘'That,” said 
he carelessly, “is approximately my idea of where 
the frontier should run.” Upon opening his morning 
papL^r a few days later he was astounded to find that 
the line of demarcation which he had so casually 
suggested had actually been adopted by the treaty- 
makers as the new frontier. 

I suppose that some partition of Hungary was in¬ 
evitable after the war. Included in the old Hungary, 
remember, were numerous large minorities, and 
there can be no denying that in many cases these 
were subjected to injustice and oppression. Conse¬ 
quently, the Hungarians did not come into court with 
clean hands. It is very difficult to decide, however, 
whether the treatment now being accorded to the 
Magyar minorities in Rumania and Czechoslovakia 
is any improvement on the fashion in which the Ru¬ 
manian and Czech minorities were treated in the old 
days by the Hungarians. About all that can be said 
with any confidence is that the allies, in turning 
Transylvania over to the Rumanians, and Slovakia and 
Ruthenia to the Czechs, have not only failed lamentably 
to improve matters for the inhabitants of those regi¬ 
ons but they have created an extremely dangerous 
situation. 


31 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


While admitting the impossibility of drawing 
boundaries which would work no hardships and 
which would be just to all the peoples concerned, the 
point I wish to make is that the present frontiers 
were fixed on no principle—economic, ethnographic, 
geographic, or political. There is nothing which 
makes for security or permanence. For the surgical 
operation performed on Hungary by the amateur 
map-makers at the Trianon no adequate reason has 
ever been shown, and it is certain that a high-spirited 
people like the Hungarians will never rest until the 
injury done them has been repaired. It is obvious 
that they cannot acquiesce in an arrangement which 
strangles their commerce, erects barriers where no 
natural divisions exist, and leaves more than three 
millions of their people at the mercy of foreigners 
who hate them. 

Granting the necessity of making certain rectifica¬ 
tions in the frontiers, one still wonders why the job 
was done so clumsily and unintelligently. I realize, 
of course, that the boundary-makers were confronted 
by a very perplexing, indeed, an almost insoluble, 
problem. If you will take trouble to examine an 
ethnographic map of the Danube basin you will see 
at a glance what I mean. Pre-war Hungary consisted 
of a vast oval plain surrounded by a fence of moun¬ 
tains. The inhabitants of this plain formed one of 
the most homogeneous peoples is the world—de¬ 
scendants of those warrior tribesmen who came rid¬ 
ing out of Asia in the dim dawn of history. Through- 


32 



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THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


out the centuries they have steadfastly refrained 
from intermarriage with the neighboring peoples 
and, as a consequence, the old Magyar strain has re¬ 
mained astonishingly pure. But the situation was 
quite different along the fringes of the plain, where, 
as the result of successive invasions and migrations, 
other peoples—Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthe- 
nians, Rumanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes—had be¬ 
come inextricably intermingled with the original 
Magyar population. As a consequence, it is hard to 
decide which an ethnogaphic map of central Europe 
most resembles—a patchwork quilt or a jig-saw 
puzzle. 

The Hungarians assert that the territories ceded 
to Rumania and Czechoslovakia under the terms of 
the treaty of Trianon are in spirit Hungarian and 
are inhabited in the main by people of the Magyar 
race, supporting the latter contention with elabo¬ 
rately colored maps and impressive arrays of figures. 
Now the truth is that every town of any size in 
Transylvania, and nearly every town in the Car¬ 
pathians, is predominantly Magyar, in many cases 
almost wholly so. But it is equally true that the 
country districts of Transylvania are chiefly inhab¬ 
ited by Rumanians, and in the Carpathians by men of 
a variety of other races, mainly Slovaks and Ruthe- 
nians. In fact, were an honest census taken in these 
disputed territories, town and country being re¬ 
garded as one, it is possible that the Magyars would 
be found to be slightly in the minority. 


33 


3^ 



THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


Every one must recognize, of course, that it would 
be utterly out of the question to delimit a frontier 
which would leave all the Magyars on one side and 
all the non-Magyars on the other. Even the Hun¬ 
garians admit this. What they object to is that there 
has been no give and take; that the allies, in order 
to give all the Slavs to Yugoslavia, all the Rumani¬ 
ans to Rumania, and all the Slovaks and Ruthenians 
to Czechoslovakia, likewise handed over to those 
nations three and a quarter million Magyars. In 
certain cases, moreover, solid blocks of Magyars 
were handed over to their enemies for purely 
strategic reasons. For Hungary it has been a case of 
‘'Heads I win, tails you lose.” 

As might have been expected, enormous economic 
difficulties have resulted from the unintelligent 
fashion in which the new boundaries were drawn. 
Esztergom, the ancient capital of the Arpdd kings 
and the birthplace of St. Stephen, is a case in point. 
The city itself, being on the right bank of the Danube, 
remains in Hungary, but the railway station, being 
on the left bank, is now in Czechoslovakia. And. the 
bridge having been destroyed, there is no longer any 
connection between the two. 

Consider the case of the miners of Salg6 Tarjan. 
The town in which they live is now in Czechoslovakia, 
whereas the entrances to the mines in which they 
earn their living are on the Hungarian side of the 
line. So every morning when they go to work they 
have to present their passports, properly vis6d, to 


34 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


two sets of frontier officials, and they have to repeat 
the performance every evening when they go home. 
Imagine the same rule applied to every person who 
lives in Brooklyn or Jersey City but works in New 
York! 

Another interesting case is provided by Pecs and 
Szeged, in the south of Hungary. P6cs has coal 
mines, and Szeged, an important industrial city, has 
factories which require coal. The distance by rail¬ 
way between the two cities is only about fourscore 
miles, but the railway twice crosses the Yugoslav- 
Hungarian frontier, so that coal sent by that route 
would have to pay an import duty each time. The 
only way, therefore, for the Szeged factories to ob¬ 
tain P4cs coal is via Budapest, which entails a detour 
of something over five hundred miles. To again em¬ 
ploy an American parallel, it is as though Scranton 
coal, in order to reach Philadelphia had to be shipped 
via Buffalo. 

In the old days economic life in Hungary was very 
simple. The farmers of the plain sold their grain and 
live stock to the people of the mountains, and the 
highlanders found a ready market for their coal and 
lumber among the folk on the plain. It might be sup¬ 
posed that this common-sense interchange of com¬ 
modities would have continued, regardless of the 
artificial political barriers erected by the map- 
makers of the Trianon. But such is not the case. On 
the contrary, commercial intercourse between Hun¬ 
gary and. her former provinces has been obstructed 


35 


3 ' 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


by every device that the ingenuity and maliciousness 
of her neighbors can suggest. 

The theory of the allied powers was that the 
Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell, not because it was 
composed of numerous nationalities, but because the 
rights and liberties of the subject nationalities had 
not been adequately secured. To guard against a re¬ 
currence of these abuses they introduced a new sys¬ 
tem into European politics—the system of inter¬ 
national guarantee of the rights of minorities and 
international supervision of their protection. In 
order to secure these rights, special articles were 
included in the various peace treaties and special 
minorities treaties were concluded between the prin¬ 
cipal allied powers and the succession states. Gener¬ 
ally speaking, these instruments give the following 
guarantees to the minority populations: 

1. Rights equal to those of any nationals of the country 
to protection of life and liberty and the free exercise of 
their religion. 

2. A special right to the acquisition of the nationality of 
the country in question and to the exercise of civil and 
political rights. 

3. Free use of their mother-tongue in public life, in trade, 
in religion, in the press, in publications, in public meetings, 
and in the courts of law. 

4. The right of maintaiuing at their own expense chari¬ 
table, religious, or educational institutions. 

5. In districts in which the minority constitutes a con¬ 
siderable proportion of the population instruction in the 
primary schools of the state shall be given in the language 


86 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


of that minority, and the minority shall be assured an 
equitable share in the sums provided by the state and 
municipal budgets for educational, religious, or charitable 
purposes. 

Though under pressure from the great powers, 
the Rumanian Government was forced to sign the 
minorities treaties, it became amply clear from the 
outset that it had no intention of abiding by them, the 
excuse offered for violating them being that they 
limited the nation’s sovereignty. As to the policy 
which should be pursued toward the Hungarian 
minorities the public men and publicists of Rumania 
are divided into two camps which hold diametrically 
opposed points of view. 

The attitude of the more intelligent and more far- 
seeing party, which, unfortunately, represent only 
a small minority, has been voiced by an eminent Ru¬ 
manian scholar. Professor Trajan Bratu. 

‘‘Whether we like it or not,” he writes, “we have 
racial and religious minorities in our country which 
form one third of the total and one half of the town 
population. We can neither destroy them, nor force 
them to leave the country. It is evident that the in¬ 
terests of our country demand that we should live 
in harmony with them, not estrange them and turn 
them into enemies.” 

The opposite and popular point of view is ex¬ 
pressed by Mr. E. D. B. Vasiliu, an outspoken 
apostle of chauvinism and coercion, who declares 
that “These minorities are assimilable and must be 


37 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


put under the terror and influence of the original 
populaion.” 

And i is this latter policy that the Bucharest Gov¬ 
ernment has attempted to carry out, with the result 
that a quarter of a million of the Hungarian inhab¬ 
itants of Transylvania, the greater number belong¬ 
ing to the intelligent middle classes, have been forced 
to leave the country. This wholesale exodus of a peo¬ 
ple who had settledl in Transylvania nearly a thou¬ 
sand years beiore Rumania came into existence was 
accomplished by numerous means—by eviction from 
their homes, sequestration of their property, prohi¬ 
bition of their language, closing of their religious 
and educational institutions, by intimidation, llog- 
gino*, and even torture. The history of modern 
Europe contains few more shameful chapters. 

Because I have no wish to appear sensational; be¬ 
cause I am, generally speaking, opposed to ‘"muck¬ 
raking”; and because I am fully aware that I shall 
be charged with being a propagandist for Hungary, 
it is with considerable hesitation that I have decided 
to clinch my statements by enumerating a few of the 
outrages which the Rumanian Government has in¬ 
flicted on its helpless Hungarian minorities. 1 use 
“outrage” advisedly; it is the only adequate word. 
Let me make it amply clear, however, that I hold no 
grudge against the Rumanians or their Government. 
The former, as individuals, I rather like; their Gov¬ 
ernment—from which, incidentally, as from the 
members of the ruling family, 1 have received many 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


courtesies—I consider one of the most corrupt and 
tyrannical in Europe. But even at the risk of being 
held ungrateful, I feel that it is my duty to tell my 
readers what I firmly believe to be the truth about 
the Transylvanian situation. 

I have been in Transylvania on several occasions 
since the annexation; I have talked with Rumanians 
and Hungarians of all classes and of all shades of 
opinion; and the instances which I shall quote, far 
from being untrustworthy rumors, are amply sus¬ 
ceptible of proof, borne of them are authenticated by 
official orders; others are taken from the report of 
the commission sent to Transylvania by the Ameri¬ 
can Unitarian Association, the veracity and fairness 
of whose members are above suspicion. 

The first and simplest stage in the Rumanization 
of Transylvania was to change the external appear¬ 
ance of the towns. Immediately after the occupation, 
the military authorities ordered not only the removal 
of the Hungarian inscriptions on public buildings, 
railways, and schools, which was doubtless justifia¬ 
ble, but also the changing of the street names and 
shop signs, even in those communities with unmixed 
Hungarian and Saxon populations. In Vajdahunyad 
four days were allowed for changing the shop signs 
from Hungarian to Rumanian; in Zilah, a fortnight; 
in Csikszereda the proprietors of two caf^s—the 
Kossuth and the Europe—were fined 1000 lei each 
for not changing the names of their establishments 
within the allotted time. 


39 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


The director of railways, General Jonescu, issued 
an order forbidding railway employees to announce 
the names of the stations or to give any informa¬ 
tion to travelers in Hungarian. *‘No excuse/’ the 
order reads, “will be accepted for giving any infor¬ 
mation to anybody in another language than 
Rumanian.” 

The director of the post and telegraph office at 
Temesvar sent the following notification to his sub¬ 
ordinates : “I wish to inform all superior and infe¬ 
rior ofiicials that I shall no longer tolerate the use of 
Hungarian in the offices. Customers must always be 
answered in Rumanian, unless they are absolutely 
ignorant of the language.” 

The chief educational inspector of Arad ordered 
that the pupils of the state schools must use Ru¬ 
manian exclusively. “The minister of education,” 
the order ran, “wishes to exclude all kinds of racial 
and religious strife from the schools. This can only 
be realized if the pupils use Rumanian instead of 
their mother-tongue. In consequence he orders that 
they shall use that language even in their private 
intercourse.” 

The commission sent to Rumania by the American 
Unitarian Association reported that in some places 
the churches of that denomination had been com¬ 
pelled to expunge the familiar Unitarian motto, 
,'Egy az Isien'" (God is One), over their doors; and 
that the authorities had notified the Unitarian bishop 
of Transylvania that his oificial communications 


40 








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THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


would not be answered until the words of the motto 
on his ancient seal of office, ^'Uniiarius puspok,' 
were changed to Rumanian. 

Though the Hague convention specifically forbids 
‘‘all seizure or destruction of, or wilful damage to, 
institutions, historic monuments, works of art and 
science,” the Rumanian authorities ordered the re¬ 
moval or destruction of all memorials, statues, and 
tablets which might serve to remind the Hungarian 
minorities of their past history. 

In Brasso the memorial of Arpdd, the Magyar 
prince who led the Hungarians into their present 
country a thousand years ago was blown up. The 
statue of the Emperor Francis Joseph in Kardn- 
sebes was demolished as a symbol of “the humiliat¬ 
ing and shameful past.” Both in Nagyszeben and 
Ujszentes the memorial tablets of Petdfi, the greatest 
Hungarian poet, were broken into bits. In Marosvd- 
sdrheiy the Rumanian mayor ordered all the fres¬ 
coes and stained-glass windows of the town hall and 
the museum to be destroyed because they depicted 
scenes from Hungarian history. 

In many parts of the annexed territories the wear¬ 
ing of Hungarian costumes, the singing of Hunga¬ 
rian songs, the dancing of Hungarian dances even, 
have been forbidden under penalty of fines or im¬ 
prisonment. In the spring of 1923 the Bucharest 
Government issued an order that all books printed in 
the Hungarian language in Hungary since 1919 and 
found in Rumanian territory were to be confiscated. 


41 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


This order included not only propagandist publica¬ 
tions but translations of the works of Homer, Goethe, 
and Shakespeare! 

From reputable sources I heard numerous stories 
of the brutalities—imprisonment, floggings, tortures 
even—indicted by the Rumanians on innocent per¬ 
sons for no other reason than that they were Hun¬ 
garians, but I shall not repeat them here because I 
am unable to substantiate them, though I have nc 
reason to believe that they are untrue. 

It should be kept in mind, of course, that ever since 
the cloi-e of the war the Rumanians have been highly 
excited and the country in a continuous state of po¬ 
litical turmoil; that public opinion has been syste¬ 
matically inflamed by chauvinistic propaganda; that 
many of the minor officials doubtless acted on their 
own initiative, without the authority of the central 
government; and that numerous Rumanian indi¬ 
viduals seized the opportunity offered by the annexa¬ 
tion, with the confusion which ensued, to vent their 
spite on those who had formerly been their masters 
and to satisfy ancient grudges. The undeniable fact 
remains, however, that the Hague convention, to 
which Rumania is a signatory, has been repeatedly 
violated; that the minorities treaties have been 
treated as scraps of paper; and that Rumania's new 
subjects have in many cases been denied those ele¬ 
mentary rights which they have been solemnly guar¬ 
anteed and to which every dictate of human justice 
entitles them. 


42 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


In the spring of 1922 the curtain rose on the last 
act of the tragedy of the non-Rumanian peoples of 
Transylvania when the expropriation of their lands 
began under the provisions of the agrarian reform, 
whose chief aim was the destruction of the Hunga¬ 
rian landed interests. I have not the space at my dis¬ 
posal wherein to discuss the arguments for and 
against this radical measure. Justly administered, 
there is much to be said in its favor, for in theory it 
takes land from those who have more than iheir 
n^ eds require and gives it to those who have little or 
none. But it has not been justly administered in 
Transylvania. It is enough to say here, however, that 
the peasants have received an average of less than 
three acres apiece; that more than one third of the 
total area expropriated has been retained by the 
state; that the owners have been reimbursed to the 
extent of only about 5 per cent, of the market value 
of the lands taken from them, and even this was not 
in cash but in non-transferable government bonds; 
that the agricultural prosperity of Transylvania 
has suffered enormously; and that the wh le trans¬ 
action has been characterized by scandals which have 
implicated some of the highest officials in the kingdom. 

It is necessary, however, to distinguish between 
the cases of those Hungarian residents of Transyl¬ 
vania who have acquired Rumanian citizenship, and 
whose properties the Rumanian Government there¬ 
fore has a legal right to do with as it pleases, and 
the cases of the other owners of property in Tran- 


43 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


sylvania who are not Rumanian citizens. To those 
French, British, and Italian nationals whose hold¬ 
ings in Transylvania have been expropriated the Ru¬ 
manian Government has given full indemnity, paying 
them approximately five million dollars a year. I 
know of a French countess, for example, whose claim 
was paid in full, and in cash, within a week. The 
Transylvanian landowners of Hungarian national¬ 
ity, on the other hand, have not been compensated 
at all. It is against this action, which is not only 
discriminatory but which violates the peace treaties 
and all international law, that the Hungarian Govern¬ 
ment has lodged a protest with the League of Nations. 

Paragraph 250 of the treaty of Trianon explicitly 
provides that ‘hhe property rights and interests of 
Hungarian nationals . . . situated in the territories 
which formed part of the former Austro-Hungarian 
monarchy shall not be subject to retention or liqui¬ 
dation. . . . Such property rights and interests shall 
be restored to their owners freed from any measure 
of this kind.” It is further provided that claims 
made by Hungarian nationals - by which is meant 
those who have retained their Hungarian citizenship 
—shall be submitted for adjudication to a mixed 
arbitral tribunal consisting of representatives of 
each of the disputing states, with a neutral chair¬ 
man. In order to obtain redress for the grievances of 
its nat onals in Transylvania, and in strict accord¬ 
ance with the provisions of the peace treaty, the 
Hungarian Government lodged an appeal with the 


44 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


League of Nations, which ordered a mixed arbitral 
tribunal to be convened. Thereupon the Rumanian 
Government declared the tribunal ‘‘non-competent” 
to deal with the issue and obstructed the proceed¬ 
ings by withdrawing its member. In January, 1927, 
after a long discussion, the tribunal confirmed its 
competence, whereupon Rumania declared point- 
blank that it would not submit to its jurisdiction. In 
March Hungary asked the League to appoint a neu¬ 
tral judge in place of the Rumanian representative 
who had been withdrawn and that the question of the 
competence of the tribunal should be submitted to 
the International Court at The Hague. This request 
was opposed by Rumania and for some reason 
refused by the League of Nations, which appointed a 
committee with Sir Austen Chamberlain, the British 
foreign minister, as reporter to consider the matter. 

When the League met in September, 1927, Sir 
Austen Chamberlain announced his decision, which 
was that the appeal to The Hague must be refused, 
and he laid down the doctrine that the Rumanian 
agrarian law superseded that country’s treaty obli¬ 
gations and that a substitu e neutral judge could 
only be appointed to the arbitral tribunal on the con¬ 
dition that the Hungarians admitted that principle in 
advance. In other words, he c:nsented to give the 
Hungarians a hearing on condition that the judg¬ 
ment went against them. In a speech which he de¬ 
livered a few days later the British statesman sought 
to excuse his extraordinary decision by explaining 


45 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


that it had been largely influenced by political con¬ 
siderations. 

A friend who occupies a high position in European 
diplomacy, and who is in a position to know whereof 
he speaks, told me that what had really happened 
was this. Word was received by the Government at 
Bucharest that the committee’s decision was likely 
to be adverse to Rumania. Thereupon Queen Marie, 
who is a very adroit and subtle person, wrote to her 
cousin King George, warning him that if Rumania 
was compelled to restore the Hungarian lands which 
it had confiscated, or pay the owners their full value 
for them, it would inevitably precipitate a revolution 
in that country, which, as the result of misgovern- 
ment and popular discontent, is on the verge of an¬ 
archy anyway. Though British sovereigns punc¬ 
tiliously refrain from meddling in politics, it may be 
assumed that King George communicated the 
queen’s warning to Sir Austen Chamberlain, per¬ 
haps with the hint that it might be expedient for the 
committee to evade so dangerous an issue for the 
time being. As, even in constitutional England, a 
royal recommendation carries considerable weight. 
Sir Austen promptly pressed his foot down hard 
upon the soft pedal. Such is the 'hnside” story of the 
incident as it was told to me. You can take it lor 
what it is worth. 

No episode in the whole history of the League, not 
even the weak kneed vacillation displayed when 
Corfu was bombarded by the Italians, has done as 


46 


THE HANGER ON THE DANUBE 


much as the Chamberlain decision to discredit the 
great tribunal at Geneva. If this statement is ques¬ 
tioned, one has only to read the speeches made in 
the House of Lords in November, 1927, by Lord 
Newton, Lord Carson, Lord Buckmaster, and Lord 
Charnwood. 

The truth of the matter is that the cards are 
stacked against Hungary at Geneva, a fact which, 
well known to the diplomatists, affords great glee to 
the Governments of the Little Entente nations, causes 
the opponents of the League to shrug their shoulders 
in cynical amusement, and to its sincere supporters 
brings discouragement and gloom. Though Sir 
Austen Chamberlain opposed the Hungarian claim 
on grounds of political expediency, perhaps in the 
sincere belief that by so doing he could best serve 
the cause of European peace if not of international 
justice, I am inclined to believe that he was not deaf 
to the counsels of France. Now a great number of 
French statesmen believe in their hearts that Hun¬ 
gary has a just case, and some of them have had the 
courage openly to espouse it, but the foreign policies 
of France are largely shaped by a permanent official, 
the political director of the Foreign Office, who is 
violently, almost venomously, anti-Hungarian and 
makes no attempt to conceal it. It was his insistence, 
I imagine, which caused the French foreign minister, 
Aristide Briand, to suggest to Baron Koranyi, the 
Hungarian minister in Paris, that Hungary with¬ 
draw her appeal to the League of Nations in the in- 


47 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


terests of European peace. It is extremely difficult 
to understand the attiiude of the French Govern¬ 
ment, or of the British Government as represented 
by Sir Austen Chamberlain, for if their views pre¬ 
vail, and if it is admitted that the Rumanian Gov¬ 
ernment has the legal right to violate her treaty 
agreements and to confiscate the property of for¬ 
eigners, a precedent will thereby be established of 
which certain countries, notably Russia and Mexico, 
will not be slow to take advantage. The French and 
British Governments have been violent in denuncia¬ 
tion of the soviets for confiscating the properties in 
Russia of their respective nationals, yet in almost 
the same breath they affirm the right of the Rumani¬ 
ans to do precisely the same thing. If the Rumanians 
are within their rights in confiscating the farmlands 
of Hungarians, why, it may pertinently be asked, are 
not the Bolsheviki justified in nationalizing French- 
owned industries, or the Mexicans in seizing British 
oil-wells ? The cases are on all fours. The real gravity 
of Sir Austen Chamberlain’s decision, however, lies 
in the fact that it is a stunning, if not a fatal, blow 
to the whole system of international arbitration, and, 
consequently, to the League of Nations. 

It IS my own conviction that the present situation 
in Rumania cannot last indefinitely. The late King 
Ferdinand may not have been a strong ruler, but he 
was a much more sagacious one than he was com¬ 
monly credited with being, and he was held in genu¬ 
ine affection by the great mass of the Rumanian peo- 


48 




















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THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


pie, a fact which enabled him to exercise a moderat¬ 
ing influence on the politicians. It was an evil day 
for Rumania when that influence was taken away, 
for since the king’s death the country has been a 
battle-ground for rival factions, who seem willing 
to wreck it in order to achieve their selfish ends. It is 
common knowledge that many branches of the ad¬ 
ministration are rotten with corruption; there have 
been uncovered numerous scandals which have im¬ 
plicated some of the highest in the land; the kingdom 
seethes with unrest if not with actual sedition; the 
National Peasants’ party is daily growing stronger 
and more self-assertive; public reseniment at the 
harsh dictatorship of the Bratianu family is steadily 
increasing; and even the rigid censorship imposed 
by the Government has failed to stifle the murmurs 
of dissatisfaction. 

Though the late dictator, Jon Bratianu, is sup¬ 
posed to have had the whip and reins firmly in his 
grasp, he is known to have met with opposition from 
the Council of Regency, which he himself created 
and was reputed to have held in contempt. This tri¬ 
umvirate, composed ol the primate of Rumania, the 
chief justice of the court of cassation, and Prince 
Nicholas, the youthful uncle of the boy king, cer¬ 
tainly could not be characterized as a strong com¬ 
bination. It is generally understood that Queen 
Marie was bitterly resentful toward Bratianu for 
having been excluded Irom the Council ot Regency, 
and there are many who believe that, in order to 


TPIE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


regain her power, she was prepared to make common 
cause with her exiled son, the profligate Carol, from 
whom, officially at least, she has been estranged. 
Carol is known to have been in communication with 
the leaders of the National Peasants’ party, and 
was prepared with their support to defy the Bra- 
tianus and make a try for the throne. Those who are 
familiar w.th the highly involved political situation 
are convinced, however, that, rather than see Carol 
on the thione, Bratianu would have overthrown the 
monarchy and established a republic, with himself as 
president-dictator. Be this as it may, it can be said 
that almost any change in Rumania would be for the 
better. It is quite conceivable, moreover, that another 
form of government, particularly if the Peasants’ 
party were in power, might see the wisdom of deal¬ 
ing more generously with the minorities and of tak¬ 
ing steps to effect a reconciliation with Hungary. 

Hungary is bordered on tne north by the post-war 
republic of Czechoslovakia, which, under the terms 
of the treaty of Trianon, was permitted to annex 
virtually the whole of Hungarian Slovakia and 
Ruthenia, the former being inhabited by some 
800,000 Hungarians. Though the condition of the 
Magyars m Czechoslovakia is immeasurably better 
than that of their brethren in Rumania, their lot is 
not a happy one and the minorities question is be¬ 
coming increasingly acute. 

In November, 1926, the Hungarian National 
Assembly became a thing of the past, being sue- 


oO 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


ceeded by a parliament consisting of two houses. 
The upper house, which takes the place of the 
former House of Magnates, is considerably more 
democratic in its composition than the old body. 
It consists of three members of the Palatinate, 
as the Hungarian branch of the Habsburg family is 
termed; thirty-eight nobles elected by their own fam¬ 
ily groups, who correspond to the old hereditary 
members; some fifty members elected by the county 
councils and municipalities; nineteen representatives 
of the Roman Catholic church, eleven of the Protes¬ 
tant, and two of the Jewish faith. The body also in¬ 
cludes such dignitaries as the judges of the high 
court, the attorney-general, the governor of the na¬ 
tional bank, the commander-in-chief of the army, and 
forty elected representatives of scientific institu¬ 
tions, art societies, agricultural bodies, and the 
stock exchange. Finally, there are forty members ap¬ 
pointed for life on the Government’s nomination. 
The lower house consists of 245 members, a com¬ 
fortable majority being held by the Party of Na¬ 
tional Unity, of which Count Bethlen is the leader, it 
is significant of the state of political feeling in the 
country, which has not forgotten the terrors of the 
Commune, that the Socialists have succeeded in elect¬ 
ing only fourteen members of the lower house. 

In reviewing the list of members of the upper 
house one cannot but be struck by the fact that it is 
one of the few survivals of feudalism to be found in 
Europe, it is not fair, however, to judge it by west- 


51 


4 - 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


ern standards, for it is undoubtedly adapted to the 
conditions existing in Hungary, where the destinies 
of the peasants are still to a great extent in the 
benevolent keeping of the great landowners. And 
with this state of affairs the peasants appear quite 
content. The truth is that the Hungarians are not 
democrats and are the only people in Europe who 
have the nerve to say so. 

It is extremely fortunate for Hungary that she has 
at the head of her government such a man as Ad¬ 
miral Horthy. He is certainly not a great statesman, 
and perhaps he cannot even be classed as a very 
brilliant man, but there is no question of his ability, 
sincerity, and strength of character. His Highness 
Nicholas Horthy de Nagybdnya, governor of Hun¬ 
gary, to give him his full title and name, was born in 
1868 at Szolnok in eastern Hungary, his family be¬ 
longing to the lesser nobility. At the outbreak of the 
war he was appointed to command the cruiser 
Novara and particularly distinguished himself at 
the battle of Otranto, when, with three ships, he 
broke through the Italian cordon blockading the 
straits and, although severely wounded, remained on 
deck and continued the tight until he succeeded in 
bringing his squadron safely to its home port. For 
this exploit he was awarded the military cross of 
Maria Theresa, the highest reward for valor in the 
gift of the Austro-Hungarian Government. 

He performed his greatest service to his country, 
however, by restoring order after the fall of the 


52 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


Communist r6gime-~a task which was done with no 
licht hand by a sailor who regarded the spirit of 
discipline as more important than the praise of kings 
or the blame of politicians. But the gravest respon¬ 
sibilities which the regent was called upon to face 
were the two attempts of the late King Charles to 
regain the throne of Hungary. When in April, 1921, 
Charles came to Hungary unarmed, Horthy refused 
to obey his summons to hand over the reins of gov¬ 
ernment. 

When on his second venture, in October of the 
same year, Charles came with troops against the 
capital, the regent had no alternative but to fight 
him and, upon taking him prisoner, to surrender him 
to the allies. He found himself in the plight of hav¬ 
ing to decide between an allegiance sworn as ad¬ 
miral and privy councilor to his king, and the oath 
taken as regent to the National Assembly. That his 
course was dictated by the highest sense of honor 
and patriotism no one can justly deny. He had to lead 
his country through difficulties which few men in his¬ 
tory have been called upon to face, and it is small 
wonder that in doing it he had to take drastic 
measures and has made many enemies. 

With his clean-cut features, his erect, active figure, 
and his outspoken fashion of utterance, Horthy may 
be described as a typical sailor, a younger edition 
of the English Admiral Fisher or of our own Robley 
Evans, though with considerably more tact than 
either. Frank, simple, and direct in manner, he has 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


a profound contempt for the subterfuges of diplo¬ 
mats and the squabblings of politicians. He is de¬ 
voted to sport, a fine shot, a brilliant tennis player, 
an accomplished horseman, and in private inter¬ 
course, as T discovered, he possesses to an excep¬ 
tional degree the kingly faculty of making those with 
whom he converses feel ‘‘at home.” But in official 
life he insists on a strict observance of the cere¬ 
monies which appertain to the head of a state that 
is still a monarchy. When the Hungarians seriously 
set about the business of finding an occupant for 
their empty throne they might go much farther and 
do much worse than to choose Nicholas Horthy. 

The directing genius of Hungary’s foreign affairs 
is the prime minister. Count Stephen Bethlen, who, 
by virtue of the length of time he has held olfice. is 
the dean of European premiers. The leader of the 
party in power and, consequently, the virtual dic¬ 
tator of the political situation, he possesses ex¬ 
traordinary political acumen. Though not a showy 
statesman, he has led his people through a period of 
desperately lean and discouraging years, but never¬ 
theless a period of splendidly successful reconstruc¬ 
tion. He has been the moderating and liberalizing in¬ 
fluence in the administration and, though a member 
of the old nobility, he has gone as far in a demo¬ 
cratic sense as the situation would permit. But his 
task has been a delicate and trying one, for Hun¬ 
gary is not a country which can be ruled with either 
too light or too strong a hand. While nothing is more 


64 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


certain than that he will not permit his country to be 
led into another military adventure if he can prevent 
it, and while he has steadfastly refused to let Hun¬ 
gary enter into entangling alliances with other na¬ 
tions, it is equally certain that he will never rest in 
his efforts to recover its lost territories by every 
legitimate and peaceful means. 

* 

‘‘The name Czechoslovakia,” remarked a witty 
American diplomat with whom I was dining in 
Prague, “has cost that country an additional 1 
per cent, on its foreign loans.” The statement is 
doubtless an exaggeration, but there is a kernel of 
truth in it none the less, for there is no denying that 
to western ears the name has a barbaric sound and 
to most people suggests the Balkans. But, like so 
many things in post-war Europe, it is a political 
compromise, for the Czechs would have preferred to 
have called the new state Bohemia, which is the his¬ 
toric name of the portion they inhabit, but their 
pariners, the Slovaks, insisted on being given a full 
share in the firm name. It was an unfortunate choice, 
however, if for no other reason than that it connotes 
a hybrid country, which of course it is, in spite of 
Czech assertions to the contrary. 

The Czechoslovak Republic is one of the youngest 
countries in the world, having come into existence 
as an independent state on October 28, 1918. Situ¬ 
ated in the geographical center of the European Con- 


55 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


tinent, it forms the borderland between the German 
and the Slavonic worlds-or a bridge, if you wish to 
see it that way—the peoples which it embraces hav¬ 
ing played leading parts in the cultural develop¬ 
ment of Europe for centuries. 

Ethnographically, the republic consists of five di¬ 
visions : Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia, and 
Ruthenia, though the latter enjoys, at least in theory, 
a large measure of autonomy. It embraces, in short, 
the group of old Slavonic states which, though for 
centuries a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 
preserved their nationality in spite of the fact that 
they had lost their political independence. 

Though the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 
the flank of which Czechoslovakia was carved, v/as 
an ethnographic hodge-podge, the new republic it¬ 
self is by no means a homogeneous nation. The fig¬ 
ures of no two authorities agree, but it seems within 
the bounds of truth to assert that of the country’s 
total population, which is somewhat in excess of 
fourteen millions, probably not more than three 
sevenths ar. Czechs and one seventh Slovaks. If 
these two peoples are really one, as the Czechs insist 
and the Slovaks deny, then they form a slight ma¬ 
jority of the inhabitants. The balance of the popula¬ 
tion consists of Germans, who number aoout 
3,125,000; between 740.000 and 800,000 Magyars, de¬ 
pending upon which set of statistics you accept; 
462,000 Ruthenians, together with a considerable 
number of Foies, Jews, and various other races. 


56 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


It is perfectly true that the Slavonic race is in an 
overwhelming majority in Czechoslovakia, but as it 
is divided into a number ot peoples differing from 
one another in language, religion, culture, customs, 
and historical traditions—though these differences 
are often slight—it does not possess a national unity 
in the generally accepted sense of that term. For ex¬ 
ample, the Czechs and Slovaks speak languages 
which, though more or less similar, are nevertheless 
distinct tongues, the difference being bridged by the 
transitional dialects of Moravia. The Ruthenians— 
the name, which is a form of the word ‘"Russian,” is 
applied to those of the Little Russians who were 
Austrian subjects—speak the language of the 
Ukraine. In western Bohemia and in Silesia the pre¬ 
dominant language is German. To still further com¬ 
plicate the linguistic problem, there are numerous 
German-speaking enclaves situated in purely Czech 
districts. It might be mentioned, parenthe.ically, 
that the Czech language is greatly indebted to John 
Hus, whose best and most original works were writ¬ 
ten in the language of his country. It was the great 
Bohemian reformer who introduced the system of 
so-called diacritic marks—such as c, u, y—for he 
realized that it was quite impossible to reproduce in 
Latin characters some of the sounds peculiar to Slav 
tongues. After attempting to decipher some of the 
signs written in the language perfected by Hus it is 
easy to understand why they burned him. 

The Czechs, who are not a particularly religious 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


people, are nominally Roman Catholics, and so are 
most of the Slovaks, but there are also a good many 
Protestants in Slovakia, while the Ruthenians be¬ 
long to the Uniate church, which is closely allied to 
the Greek communion. According to the latest cen¬ 
sus, more than 5 per cent, of the inhabitants of 
Czechoslovakia have no religion. Culturally, a deep 
gulf separates the Czechs from the Slovaks and Ru¬ 
thenians, the well-educated, highly intelligent na¬ 
tives of Bohemia having little in common with the 
stolid, slow-thinking Slovak peasants or with the 
even less advanced Ruthenians. Whatever their dif¬ 
ferences, however, whether linguistic, religious, or 
cultural, the fact remains that the Czechs of 
Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, and the Slovaks 
of Slovakia comprise branches of the same Slav 
nation. 

The Czechs appear to have made themselves mas¬ 
ters of Bohemia as early as the fifth century, and for 
upward of twelve hundred years that country re¬ 
mained a Czech kingdom. Its independence was 
brought to a temporary end, however, on November 
8, 1620, when the armies of the Holy Roman Empire 
crushed the Bohemian forces at the battle of the 
White Mountain. The conquest of Bohemia, which 
was the first episode in the Thirty Years’ War, was 
precipitated when the Protestant nobles of Bohe¬ 
mia, roused by the attempts of the Roman Catholic 
church to recover its ancient hold over the country, 
refused to elect the Archduke Ferdinand to the va- 


58 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


cant throne and offered it instead to the Elector 
Frederick, Thereupon the powerful Maximilian of 
Bavaria joined his forces to those of Ferdinand, who 
had meanwhile become emperor of the Holy Roman 
Empire, and the latter also received aid from 
Spam, Poland, and several of the Italian states. 
This overwhelming array invaded Bohemia, ad¬ 
vanced upon Prague, and carried by storm the forti¬ 
fied position on the plateau known as the Bila Hora, 
or White Mountain, where the Bohemians made 
their final stand. 

Because this battle marked an epoch in the history 
of Bohemia it is as frequency referred to in that 
country as the battle of Lexington is in the United 
States, and in the events which immediately suc¬ 
ceeded it are to be found the reasons for many 
of the policies pursued by the Czechoslovak Gov¬ 
ernment. A period of three hundred years, lacking 
only a few months, intervened between the fall of 
the Bohemian kingdom and the establishment of 
the Czechoslovak Republic—a sufficiently ample 
space of time, it would seem, to permit of ancient 
grudges and historic hatreds being forgotten—yet 
the modern Czechs speak of those long-past events 
as though they had happened yesterday. Perhaps it 
is because, all down the centuries between, they have 
nursed their wrath to keep it warm. 

No sooner had Ferdinand made himself master 
of the country than he ordered the execution of the 
principal Bohemian leaders and the wholesale con- 


59 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


fiscation of the lands of all who had in any way 
opposed him. Almost the entire ancient nobility of 
Bohemia was driven into exile, and adventurers 
from all countries, mostly men who had served in 
the imperial armies, shared the spoils. This explains 
why the vast majority of the great estates in Bohe¬ 
mia are to-day in the possession of families bearing 
German, Polish, Spanish, and even Italian names, 
and it also explains, in some measure at least, why 
the Czechs are seeking to deprive those families of 
their lands. 

Gradually all those who refused to accept the 
creed of the church of Rome were expelled from 
Bohemia, and by the employment of cruelties which 
rivaled those of the Inquisition, Catholicism was 
firmly reestablished in the land. The country was 
forced to accept a new constitution which made the 
Bohemian crown hereditary in the house of Habs- 
burg, the Diet was deprived of all legislative power, 
and it was decreed that the German language should 
be placed on an equality with the Czech in all the 
government offices and law courts of the kingdom. 
This had indeed become a necessity, since, in con¬ 
sequence of the vast number of confiscations, the 
greater part of the land was in the hands of foreign¬ 
ers to whom the national language was unknown. 
Though these enactments left to Bohemia a certain 
measure of autonomy, the country gradually lost its 
ndividuality, its history from this moment until the 
outbreak of the World War being but a part of the 


60 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


history of Austria, whose emperors were automati¬ 
cally also Bohemian kings. 

Though the Czech nation, as I have shown, was 
deprived of its independence for three hundred 
years, it never abandoned the hope of eventually re¬ 
covering it, a hope which the Austrians could never 
completely extinguish in spite of their systematic 
attempts to effectually Germanize the country. The 
Czechs were quick to realize, therefore, that the out¬ 
come of the World War would have a decisive effect 
upon their future. By their traditions, their sympa¬ 
thies, and their whole political outlook the Czechs 
were on the side of western European democracy 
and against the central autocracies for whom they 
were called upon to fight. Owing to the presence of 
great numbers of German and Austro-Hungarian 
troops on Czech territory, however, open protest or 
revolution was obviously impossible, for either 
would have been suppressed with a ruthless hand. 
The opposition of the Czechs accordingly took the 
form of passive resistance, the desertion to the allies 
of considerable numbers of Czech troops when op¬ 
portunity offered, and the formation of secret socie¬ 
ties in preparation for the decisive moment. The 
brunt of the revolutionary movement was, however, 
borne by the political exiles, who, having escaped 
abroad at the beginning of the war, began to carry 
on in the allied and neutral countries an extensive 
propaganda aimed at achieving independence for 
the Czech and Slovak lands. 


61 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


The case of the Slovaks was somewhat different 
from that of the Czechs. Though they have lived in 
the region bearing their name, which until 1918 com¬ 
prised the northern counties of Hungary, since the 
fifth century, they were not animated by the tradi¬ 
tions which inspired the Czechs, for, save for two 
brief interludes, they have always been under for¬ 
eign domination. From the seventh to the tenth cen¬ 
tury they were subject to the Avars and the Franks, 
forming part of Great Moravia until in 907 that 
kingdom was conquered by the Magyars, under 
whose rule the Slovaks remained for a thousand 
years. It might be supposed that after such a length 
of time the Slovaks would have become thoroughly 
Magyarized, but such was not the case. For the Slo¬ 
vaks, who are a stubborn folk, sullenly resented the 
attitude of their Magyar masters, who always 
treated them as an inferior race and did their utmost 
to suppress the Slovak nationality in every way. 

When the temperamental and cultural differences 
of the two peoples are taken into consideration, it 
is not surprising that, after the first flush of enthusi¬ 
asm, friction should have arisen between the Czechs 
and the Slovaks. There is, in fact, a striking similar¬ 
ity between the political situation which has arisen in 
Czechoslovakia and that which exists in another com¬ 
posite Slav state, Yugoslavia, where the Croats and 
Slovenes are complaining bitterly of oppression by 
the Serb majority. The Czechs, an energetic, am¬ 
bitious, progressive, and aggressive people, who 

G2 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


outnumber the Slovaks three to one, look with con¬ 
descension, if not contempt, on their less literate, 
slower-thinking, more easy-going partners, whom, if 
the truth be known, they regard as immensely infe¬ 
rior to themselves. 

At Pittsburgh, addressing a convention composed 
of Slovaks residing in the United States, Masaryk 
solemnly promised that if they would unite with the 
Czechs and, when a peace conference was called, join 
with the latter in a demand for independence, he, as 
the president of the Czech National Council, would 
guarantee the Slovaks complete autonomy within 
the proposed state, with a constitution and a parlia¬ 
ment of their own. This promise he reiterated in 
writing. There is little evidence, however, that the 
Slovaks who attended the Pittsburgh meeting were 
other than self-appointed delegates, or that they 
were authorized to speak for their compatriots 
either in the United States or at home. Yet, at the 
Peace Conference in Paris, when the question of 
forming a Czechoslovak state came up for discus¬ 
sion, and it was proposed that a plebiscite should be 
taken, Masaryk produced this agreement as proof 
that ihe whole Slovak people were in favor of union. 
When, however, certain Slovaks demanded that the 
wishes of the Slovak nation be determined by plebi¬ 
scite, Masaryk told them that the pledges contained 
in the Pittsburgh document were not binding, as it 
had been signed on a public holiday. Later in the 
same year, at Turciansky St. Martin, another 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


equally astute politician, Hlinka by name, induced 
some of his Slovak supporters to issue a similar 
declaration, the idea being to convince the still hesi¬ 
tant allies that both American and European Slo¬ 
vaks were in favor of union with the Czechs; but in 
a statement issued by the Slovak nationalists in 1922 
it was pointed out that neither the Pittsburgh nor 
the Turciansky St. Martin signatories possessed the 
slightest authority to speak for the people of Slo¬ 
vakia as a whole. 

Though it is extremely difficult to learn the true 
facts of so involved a situation by a few weeks’ stay 
in a country, particularly when one does not speak 
that country’s language, I left Czechoslovakia with 
the impression ihat there is a real basis for the fre¬ 
quently repeated assertions that there is serious 
disafiection among the Slovaks and that the separa¬ 
tist movement among them is steadily gaining 
ground. Certain it is that they are profoundly dis¬ 
contented with things as they are at present, but 
whether a plebiscite would show, as certain observ¬ 
ers have claimed, that the majority of Slovaks desire 
reunion with Hungary, is open to question. 

Leaving aside the question of whether they were 
or were not jockeyed into a union with the Czechs, 
the chief complaint of the Slovaks, so far as I have 
been able to determine, is that the Czechs are sub¬ 
jecting them to both political oppression and 
systematic economic exploitation. Since the estab¬ 
lishment of the republic, if the Slovaks are to be 


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THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


believed, upward of a million Czech officials, trades¬ 
men, and laborers have settled in Slovakia, thereby 
making it that much more difficult for the less 
efficient Slovaks to earn a living. It is also pointed 
out that a number of S ovak industries, such as the 
explosis^es factory at Bratislava and the government 
mint at Kremnica, have been removed to Bohemia, 
thereby throwing large numbers of Slovaks out of 
work. To this the Government replies that the plants 
in question were too near the frontier and were 
moved into the interior of the country for purely 
strategic reasons. 

I also heard complaints to the effect that the 
Czechs were the sole beneficiaries of the Land Re¬ 
form Act, and that, as a result of the unfair man¬ 
ner in which it has been executed, thousands of 
Slovak laborers are without employment; that Czech 
industrial, commercial, and banking firms have been 
accorded privileges denied to Slovak business 
houses; and that concessions for exploiting the state 
domains have been granted mainly, if not exclu¬ 
sively, to Czechs. Just how much justification there 
is for these charges I have bsen unable to determine 
to my own satisfaction. I have reason to believe, 
however, that there is considerable ground for the 
complaint that Czechs are given systematic prefer¬ 
ence in the various dorms of government employ¬ 
ment, even in Slovakia itself. Though it is undeniable 
that the Czechs, as a whole, are better educated and 
far more efficient than the Slovaks, there are among 


66 


5 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


the latter many men who could quite safely be in¬ 
trusted with administrative duties, but they do not 
appear to be very numerous in the government bu¬ 
reaus. Tnis policy, if it is a policy, is pursued, I 
suppose, in order to keep the administration in 
Czech hands. 

It is obviously undesirable for a country to have 
two languages—though the system seems to work 
smoothly enough in Belgium, where both French 
and Flemish are officially used—but it would appear 
that the Czechs have quite needlessly antagonized 
the Slovaks by attempting to coerce the latter into 
using the Czech language. Slovak children are being 
compelled to learn Czech, to which I can see no great 
objection; passports and other official documents are 
now almost invariably written in the official lan¬ 
guage, which seems reasonable; but I see no neces¬ 
sity for insisting that the sign-posts and street 
names in Slovak territory shall be in Czech, nor is 
there the shadow of an excuse for the prohibition 
of the Slovak national anthem. The Slovak press is 
under a rigid censorship, letters and printed matter 
entering Slovakia are liable to censorship and con¬ 
fiscation. and it is not wholly wise for a Slovak to 
insist on his right, as guaranteed by the constitution, 
to free speech. 

Perhaps the most foolish thing the Czechs have 
done, however, is their persecution, for that is what 
it amounts to, of the Roman Catholic church in Slo¬ 
vakia, where various measures, including confisca- 


66 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


tion of its property, have been taken to diminish 
the church’s power and influence. A considerable 
number of the leading Czechs are frankly irreligious 
and nearly all of them are violently opposed to any¬ 
thing which smacks of clericalism—in which respects 
their theories tend toward communism—whereas the 
vast majority of the Slovaks are devout churchmen, 
and it seems folly to meddle with their religion. In 
the words of Talleyrand, ^It is worse than a crime; 
it is a mii^take.” 

In discussing the differences between the Czechs 
and the Slovaks it is easy to be an alarmist, but, pro¬ 
vided the Czechs adopt a more conciliatory attitude 
toward their partners, I see no real reason for 
alarm. The Slovaks undoubtedly have numerous 
grounds for their complaints, and, as they are a 
stubborn and determined people, the Czechs would 
do well to heed them. I do not believe that there is 
any large element among the Slovaks which seri¬ 
ously desires reunion with Hungary, and they as¬ 
suredly must realize that a nation of only two 
millions of people could not go it alone. If the Czechs 
will put an end to the existing bitterness by freely 
conceding to the Slovaks those rights as equal part¬ 
ners which they were promised by the agreement 
of Pittsburgh and which are guaranteed them by the 
constitution, I see no reason why the Czechoslovak 
Republic should not continue as a going and pros¬ 
perous concern. 

The Czechs and Slovaks are so closely related™ 


67 


5 * 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


they represent two branches of the same Slav race— 
and, despite their numerous differences, have so 
much in common, that their union, far from being 
artificial, is a perfectly natural and logical one. Ru- 
thenia, which joined the republic later on, is in a 
somewhat different category from the other divi¬ 
sions, for it enjoys a large measure of autonomy and 
is bound to Czechoslovakia proper by very loose ties. 
There are also upward ot three million Austro- 
Germans in the country-they outnumber the Slo¬ 
vaks in the proportion of three to two—but they 
dwell for the most part in Bohemia, where they are 
so interspersed with the Czech population that it 
would have been humanly impossible to have de¬ 
limited a frontier which would have separated the 
two races even approximately. Though the Germans 
of Bohemia remember with regret the old days when 
they were masters of the land, and though they in¬ 
dulge in chronic complaints about Czech oppression, 
they are amply able to look after their own interests, 
and, so far as I could observe, the two races are 
getting along together tolerably well. I imagine, in¬ 
deed, that if the Germans were given their choice 
between remaining citizens of the vigorous young 
Czechoslovak Republic or of being restored to an 
Austria that is now weak and helpless, most of them 
would vote to continue as they are. They might think 
quite differently, however, were Austria to become 
a part of the German Reich, as in time it almost cer¬ 
tainly will. 


68 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


But the Magyars of Czechoslovakia, of whom 
there are probably not far fiom 800,000, are in an 
entirely different position, for they form a compact 
group along the southern borders of the new state, 
to which they were annexed against their will and to 
which they are attached by none of the motives of 
expediency or self-interest which animate the Bohe¬ 
mian Germans. The bulk of the Hungarians in 
Czechoslovakia are in the ‘'black lands,'* an ex¬ 
tremely rich agricultural region lying along the 
banks of the Danube where that river forms a nat¬ 
ural frontier between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. 
The Czech argument is similar to that of Italy re¬ 
garding the Brenner Pass, or England’s with respect 
to Gibraltar—namely, that it is a military necessity; 
though in agreeing to it the peace delegates were 
compelled to jettison the principle of self-determina¬ 
tion which they had so loudly proclaimed. It was 
generally understood at the time that the action of 
the treaty-makers in permitting Czechoslovakia to 
annex this compact mass of Hungarians was due to 
the insistence of Marshal Foch and the French gen¬ 
eral staff, who, with that lack of vision which so fre¬ 
quently characterizes professional military men, 
declared that the cause of European tranquillity 
would be better served by giving the Czechoslovaks 
a strong military frontier than by permitting a few 
hundred thousand peasants to remain Hungarian. 

Tne injustice of the transaction was tacitly ad¬ 
mitted by the allies at the signing of the treaty of 


69 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


Trianon in a covering letter written by the French 
premier, M. Millerand, which promised that the 
frontiers as laid down should, if necessary, be re¬ 
vised. Even more significant is the testimony of Mr. 
Lloyd George, war-time premier of Great Britain, 
who, writing in September, 1927, in regard to the 
treaties with the central powers, said: “I can state 
emphatically that their authors never claimed for 
them such a degree of perfection that they held them 
to be immutable. ... We all distinctly contem¬ 
plated the possibility of certain clauses and provi¬ 
sions of the treaties themselves being made the sub¬ 
ject of discussion, adjudication and possible revision 
by the great tribunal set up in the first clause of 
these treaties—the League of Nations.” 

Though the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia have 
fared far better than their brethren under Rnma- 
nian rule, though they have escaped the brutalities 
practised on the Magyars of Transylvania, their 
condition is not a happy one. Racial passions and 
nationalistic ambitions have been roused to such a 
pitch, however, the air is so filled with charges and 
counter-cliarges, with accusations and denials, that 
it is almost impossible to determine the facts of the 
situation. The extremist point of view has been 
voiced by Lord Rothermere, the English newspaper 
publisher, who, in violently championing the Hun¬ 
garian cause, states that the Hungarians in Czecho¬ 
slovakia “have been subject to oppression by the 
side of which the Germanization of Alsace-Lorraine 


70 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


pales into insignificance.” A much more temperate 
opinion is expressed by Mr. Donald Curry, the Vi¬ 
enna correspondent of the ‘^Christian Science Moni¬ 
tor,” one of the best-informed men in Europe on 
the Danubian question, who says: “As far as can 
be gathered, the Czechs probably committed some 
mistakes in their dealings with the Hungarian mi¬ 
nority, but on the whole these Hungarians are not 
nearly as dissatisfied with their position as certain 
interests would have the world believe.” The truth 
is probably to be found somewhere between these 
radically opposed points of view. 

The constitution of Czechoslovakia expressly 
guarantees all citizens of the new state full equality 
before the law and equal civil and political rights, 
whatever be their race, origin, language, or religion, 
together with full personal freedom, inviolability of 
domestic rights and of the mails, freedom of the 
press, the right of free assembly and association, 
and of the expression of opinion by word, writing, 
or print, and prohibits every manner of forcible de¬ 
nationalization. Yet these constitutional guarantees, 
many of them at least, are honored more frequently 
in the breach than in the observance. 

The principal and perhaps the most vital griev¬ 
ance put forward by the Magyar residents of Slo¬ 
vakia—there are few Magyars in Bohemia- 
concerns their rights to citizenship, which they are 
guaranteed by the treaty of Trianon, provided they 
can prove that they enjoyed a similar status under 


71 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


the Hungarian regime. In other words, those resi¬ 
dents in the annexed territories who were Hun¬ 
garian citizens at the time of the annexation are 
presumed to have the right, if they so elect, auto¬ 
matically to become citizens of the Czechoslovak 
state. 

Under the Hungarian law any man who had lived 
in any parish for four years and had contributed to 
its taxes for the same period secured automatically 
the status of citizen, and therefore the right to vote. 
The Czechs have ruled, however, that all who had 
not acquired their citizenship prior to January 1, 
1910, are required to take out fresh naturalization 
papers. Furthermore, the parish authorities—who 
are in nearly all cases Czechs or Slovaks—must give 
their official approval before the citizenship of any 
Hungarian becomes valid. As a consequence of this 
arbitrary ruling, there are tens ot thousands of Hun¬ 
garians in Slovakia and Ruthenia, including several 
members of Parliament, who possess no naturaliza¬ 
tion papers and have been able to obtain none. The 
unwisdom and unfairness of granting such veto 
power to parish councils, the majority of whose 
members are Slovaks, will be obvious when it is re¬ 
membered that the Slovaks have a bitter hatred for 
the Magyars and eagerly seize upon this means of 
satisfying ancient grudges and paying off old scores. 

But this is only one of the expedients employed by 
the Czechoslovak majority to reduce the number of 
Magyar voles, for Parliament has passed a law 


72 








1 : 7 , 500.000 



Cecho-Slovaquia 

Area : 62 937 
inhabitants: 3575.685 










THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


which provides that the Magyars shall be permitted 
full enjoyment of their minority rights only in those 
districts in which they constitute at least 20 per cent, 
of the inhabitants. This ingenuously evades the ob- 
hgations imposed upon Czechoslovakia by the peace 
treaties by asserting that a minority is not a mi¬ 
nority if it forms less than one fifth of the total 
local population. This has resulted, as it was obvi¬ 
ously intended to do, in the disfranchisement of a 
considerable proportion of the Magyar electorate 
and the closing of a large number of Magyar schools, 
clubs, theaters, and cultural associations. Mr. Dud¬ 
ley Heathcote, who was sent to Czechoslovakia by 
the ‘‘Daily Mail” to investigate the situation, places 
the number of Magyars who have thus been deprived 
of their cultural privileges at 350,000, but the evi¬ 
dence of other observers suggests that this figure is 
considerably too high. He backs his assertion, how¬ 
ever, by the statement that the number of Magyar 
primary schools in the annexed territory has fallen 
from 2223 to just over 700, the number of secondary 
schools from 95 to 20, and the technical colleges and 
gymnasia from 67 to 10. The most reliable statistics 
obtainable seem to bear out, thousih only in part, the 
contentions of the Magyars that they are not allowed 
to have the full quota of educational institutions to 
which they are entitled. According to the Encyclo¬ 
paedia Britannica the Magyars in Czechoslovakia 
comprise approximately 5 V 2 cent, of the total 
population. According to the Statesman’s Year 


78 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


Book for 1927, 5.8 per cent, of the primary schools 
are Magyar—a fair proportion—but 0.5 per cent, of 
the secondary schools are Magyar, and less than 3 
per cent, of the gymnasia and technical institutions. 

Mr. Heathcote also points out that the Govern¬ 
ment has found another weapon for employment 
against the Magyars in an obscure clause of the 
constitution—'^a joker” it would be called in Amer¬ 
ica—which provides that even the fundamental 
right possessed by every Czechoslovak citizen, which 
entitles him to use any language he chooses, whether 
in private life, business intercourse, or in his re¬ 
ligious devotions, can be taken away arbitrarily ‘Tor 
higher reasons of state.” 

As a minor example of the oppressive methods 
employed by the Czechoslovak Government, I might 
mention that Hungarians living in Slovakia are not 
permitted to receive Hungarian newspapers, which 
are confiscated by the postal authorities, this breach 
of the constitution being based on the plea that they 
might contain attacks on the Czechoslovak adminis¬ 
tration. President Masaryk and Foreign Min ster 
Ben^s, with both of whom i discussed the matter, 
excused it by explaining that it was a measure taken 
by the police of Slovakia, which is jealous of its 
autonomous rights, and that consequently the Cen¬ 
tral Government could not interfere. 

The Hungarians in Czechoslovakia will tell you 
that their letters are subject to censorship and some¬ 
times to confiscation, and that it is safer to send 


74 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


them by registered post or, better still, by hand. 
This charge was substantiated to some extent by my 
own experience, for of three letters which I sent 
from Germany to a Hungarian friend in Slovakia, 
two were delayed for over a fortnight and the third 
was not delivered at ell. All titles of nobility were 
abolished by the constitution, but it seems rather 
petty for the postal officials to refuse to deliver let¬ 
ters because they happen to be addressed to princes, 
dukes, or counts. An example of this pettiness oc¬ 
curred when we were staying in Prague. A certain 
Count X came to call upon my daughter, but the 
manager of the hotel refused to send up his name 
until he had changed the prefix to “Mister.” 

The Government at Prague is charged with the 
toleration, if not the actual instigation, of numerous 
other acts of oppression, certain of which I have 
good reason to believe are true, while others are un¬ 
doubtedly exaggerations. Certainly it is no exag¬ 
geration, however, to say that by no elasticity of 
language can Czechoslovakia be described as a free 
country in the sense in which the Anglo-Saxon peo¬ 
ples understand that term, for she not only employs 
wholly unjustifiable measures of repression toward 
the minorities, but forbids all discussion of the situa¬ 
tion in her press, while her police seem to have 
copied the old czarist policy of espionage, censor¬ 
ship, and intimidation. 

It was apparent from the outset that the German 
nobles of Bohemia and the Hungarian magnates of 


75 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


Slovakia, who between them almost controlled the 
land, were not likely to acquiesce quietly in Czecho¬ 
slovak rule. In the interests of Czechoslovakia, 
therefore, their powers of resistance to the new 
order of things must be diminished, they must cease 
to be great landowners. Accordingly, with the 
double-barreled object of reducing them to the posi¬ 
tion of petty proprietors and of satisfying the de¬ 
mands of the land-hungry peasants, Czechoslovakia, 
like Rumania, early adopted a drastic policy of land 
expropriation. 

Now there can be no denying that social and eco¬ 
nomic conditions in the new republic made some 
3 ystem of land reform a crying necessity. Prior to 
the war most of the land was in the hands of the 
large proprietors, while the great mass of the peas¬ 
ants had little, if anything, to afford them a living. 
More than one quarter of all Bohemia was owned by 
less than 2 per cent, of the landowners. Nearly one 
third of the soil of Moravia was owned by less than 
2 per cent, of the landowners. Matters were even 
worse in Slovakia, where about a thousand persons 
owned nearly half of the entire country. 

During a conversation with Dr. Eduard Ben^s, the 
exceedingly able statesman *who is Czechoslovakia’s 
minister of foreign aflairs, I obtained a graphic 
idea of the miseries suffered by the peasants as a 
result of this pernicious system. 

'‘My parents,” said Dr. Benes, "were poor peas¬ 
ants, and I was one of a large family of children. We 

76 


The danger on the Danube 


were desperately poor. We lived in a miserable hut 
in the village of Kozlany, my father supporting us 
by tilling a small piece of leased ground. And our 
neighbors were no better off than we were. Life 
would have been more endurable for us, however, if 
we could have bought the land we lived on, instead 
of having to pay out in rent nearly everything we 
earned. But, though the nobleman who was our land¬ 
lord owned thousands of hectares, a large portion 
of the estate being preserved for shooting, he re¬ 
fused to sell a foot of soil to relieve the misery of the 
people at his gates.” 

I/It will be seen, therefore, that a very real need 
existed for the act passed in April, 1919, which au¬ 
thorized the state to take over for partition and dis¬ 
tribution estates exceeding 150 hectares (about 370 
acres) of arable land, or 250 hectares of land of any 
other category. Though the ostensible aim of the 
law was to provide the great mass of the people with 
land, thereby insuring their support of the adminis¬ 
tration, there can be no doubt that its framers were 
actuated by an ulterior motive—by the determina¬ 
tion to weaken the power of the German and/Hun¬ 
garian proprietors by transferring the titles in large 
measure to Czechoslovaks. If, as a result of the ex¬ 
propriation of their lands, the Germans and Hun¬ 
garians should be forced to leave the country, well 
and good—they were not wanted and had no busi¬ 
ness there anyway. 

The Czech point of view was summed up by an 


77 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


official of the Foreign Office with whom I discussed 
the question while I was in Prague. “We are only 
taking back what is rightfully ours,” he said. ‘'Most 
of the land which we are expropriating originally 
belonged to the Czechs, and was taken from them 
by the Austrian invaders after the battle of the 
White Mountain.” Historically, this argument is 
sound, but the battle of the White Mountain, as I 
have remarked earlier in this chapter, was fought 
three hundred years ago, which is quite a length of 
time to have held title to property, and in most 
countries wou'd make the title valid. Repeated at¬ 
tempts have been made by the Indians to obtain 
the restoration of the lands which were taken from 
them by American settlers in the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury and later, but I can recall no case where the 
courts have decided in their favor. Nor can the his¬ 
torical argument be put forward to support the 
expropriation of lands which were acquired in very 
recent years and by perfectly legitimate purchase. 
I know of one large property which was purchased 
only a few years ago, since when its owner has spent 
large sums in developing it scientifically and putting 
it on a paying basis, yet under the law he receives 
no more consideration than those of his neighbors 
whose lands have passed down to them from ma¬ 
rauding ancestors of the Middle Ages. 

Even if the Land Reform Act had been carried out 
intelligently and with scrupulous honesty it would 
have worked great hardships on the proprietors, but 


78 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


the law as interpreted and enforced at present is 
neither just in its provisions nor is it being honestly 
executed. 

In the first place, the compensation allowed the 
owners has been so insignificant as to amount to vir¬ 
tual confiscation. Most fair-minded Czechs admit 
this, but excuse it on the ground that, were the owners 
paid the full value, or anywhere near the full value, 
of their land it would cripple the country financially. 

The law provides that indemnification for expro¬ 
priated land shall be based on its average value be¬ 
tween 1913 and 1915. On the face of it, that sounds 
very fair. But it must be remembered that farming 
land has increased in value enormously since the 
war. Proof of this is found in the fact that the 
Czechoslovak Government sells the land to the peas¬ 
ants for prices from 50 to 75 per cent, in excess ot 
what it paid the owners for it, and though this dif¬ 
ference is supposed to cover the costs of subdivision 
and sale on the easy-payment plan, the Government 
nevertheless makes a very tidy profit on each trans¬ 
action. Moreover, the Government pays for the land 
in depreciated Czechoslovak crowns, which at pres¬ 
ent are worth only about one seventh of their par 
value. And, finahy, the Government need not neces¬ 
sarily pay the owner in cash at all, even in this de¬ 
preciated currency, but may give him state bonds 
bearing interest as from 3 to 4 per cent., which is 
greatly b^low ths rate prevailing in Czechoslovakia, 
where 8 per cent.is frequently paid uncommercial loans, 

T9 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


But let me make the situation clearer by a hypo¬ 
thetical example, as the lawyers say. An imaginary 
Hungarian—we will call him Michael Horthobagy— 
who was placed under Czechoslovak rule by the 
treaty of Trianon, has a property of 300 hectares 
devoted to the growing of sugar-beets. We will as¬ 
sume, for the sake of argument, that, being highly 
cultivated land, it would bring in the open market 
150,000 gold crowns, or approximately $30,000. But, 
under the law, Horthobagy is permitted to retain 
only 150 hectares, the Government expropriating the 
rest. The 150 hectares taken over by the state are 
actually worth 75,000 gold crowns - $15,000. For pur¬ 
poses of expropriation, however, the property is as¬ 
sessed not on its present value but on its average 
value during the 1913-15 period, at say, 50,000 gold 
crowns, or about $10,000. Though much less than the 
price which Hortobagy could probably obtain in the 
open market, this in not a sum to be despised. But 
—and here is the joker—instead of paying the 
50,000 crowns in gold, the Government pays them in 
paper (the paper crown, as I have stated, being 
worth only about one seventh of the gold crown), 
so that tne unfortunate Hortobagy receives tor 
property presumably worth $15,000 the equivalent 
of $1426. The Government defends this injustice— 
first, by asserting that its financial condition does 
not permit of its paying a higher rate for expropri¬ 
ated land; second, by the reminder that the paper 
crown, though greatly depreciated, is still the legal 


80 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


currency of Czechoslovakia; and, third, by pointing 
out that if the late owner holds his paper crowns 
they may appreciate as the country’s financial con¬ 
dition improves. But there is likewise the possibility 
that they may depreciate still more. 

Needless to say, the Government recognizes the 
wisdom of paying for the land which it expropriates 
in cash, that is to say, in depreciated paper, but 
under the law it can, if it sees fit, pay Horthobagy 
in non-transferable state bonds bearing 4 per cent, 
interest, in which case he would receive the munifi¬ 
cent sum of $57.04 a year in exchange for property 
which yielded him, it is fair to assume, in the neigh¬ 
borhood of $1000 per annum. 

Stripped of the hio^h sounding verbiage with which 
it has been camouflaged, taat is what expropria¬ 
tion, as practised in Czachoslovakia, means. Is it 
to be wondered at that the landowners feel that they 
are being made the victims of a deliberate policy of 
spoliation which has few countercarts in modern 
times? It may be true, as frequently stated, that 
most of proprietors are rich men, or at any rate 
well-to-do ones, and hence deserve no sympathy, but 
that is no reason for denying them a square deal. 

President Masaryk, who I have been told, looks 
on the land reform scneme as it is being applied with 
some misgivings, discussed the question with me 
very candidly. 

‘Tt would be idle to deny,” he said, “that the ex¬ 
propriation measures have worked numerous hard- 


81 


6 


THE danger on THE DANUBE 


ships on individual proprietors. But what could we 
do? We were confronted by a great national neces¬ 
sity. The peasants demanded the land, which they 
unquestionably needed, and the Government pledged 
itself to give it to them. But Czechoslovakia is poor 
—it has need for five dollars where it spends one— 
and it simply cannot afford a higher rate of com¬ 
pensation than it is paying. Unfortunately, our cur¬ 
rency is greatly depreciated, and those whose lands 
are taken suffer accordingly, but there is always the 
possibility that it may recover, perhaps return in 
time to par, in which case the proprietors would re¬ 
ceive adequate compensation for their lands.” 

My own feeling is that the greatest reproach to 
the Czechoslovak Government lies not in its adop¬ 
tion of the principle of expropriation, for some such 
measure was doubtless inevitable, or even in the in¬ 
adequacy of the compensation (the Governments of 
the Baltic states expropriated the lands of the great 
proprietors without making them any compensation 
whatever), but rather in the manner in which the law 
IS being administered. The work of dividing the 
estates has been intrusted to petty local officials, 
many of whom are notoriously corrupt, some of 
whom have been proved guilty of favoring relatives, 
friends, and political supporters, while others have 
used their power to gratify personal grudges and 
ancient enmities. I heard of several instances where 
those intrusted with the execution of the law had 
been bought off by the proprietors, but, as one of the 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


latter remarked, “One can’t keep on buying these 
fellows off forever.” 

Though it is common knowledge that the Land 
Office is mismanaged, if nothing worse, though tales 
of fraud and bribery are repeated everywhere, no 
financial reports of the expropriations have ever 
been made public, in spite of repeated appeals to the 
Government to produce them. The opposition as¬ 
serts that so many public men and politicians would 
be involved in the resultant disclosures that the Gov¬ 
ernment does not dare to make them. Indeed, if only 
a fraction of the stories which were told me about 
these land deals is true, the Czechoslovak Govern¬ 
ment is guilty of tolerating frauds compared with 
which the Teapot Dome and Indian lands scandals 
are insignificant. 

From what I have said in the foregoing pages it 
will be seen that running through the Czechoslovak 
body politic is a very distinct strain of socialism, 
which at times verges perilously on communism. In 
fact, there are twenty-one avowed Communists in 
the Czechoslovak Senate and forty-one in the Cham¬ 
ber of Deouties, to say nothing of the various brands 
of Socialists who, though not Reds, might certainly 
be classified as pinks. This is not at all surprising in 
a peasant country like Czechoslovakia, whose people 
have been embittered by centuries of foreign oppres¬ 
sion, nor do I see in the fact anything which is par¬ 
ticularly alarming, for Masaryk, Ben^s, and most 
of the other leaders are sane and able men, very far 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


from bein^ demagogues or extremists, and the 
Czechoslovaks themselves are at bottom a steady, 
level-headed race. 

The young republic is enormously rich in forests, 
mines, agricultural resources, and industrial enter¬ 
prises; its people are as progressive and energetic 
as any on the continent; the larger towns have the 
bustling, business-like atmosphtre of American 
cities; and, despite the mistakes that it has made, 
I am convinced that the Government is making a 
sincere attempt to give the country a decent admin¬ 
istration. Owing to the unsettled political state of 
the Continent generally, I look askance on all Euro¬ 
pean loans, but, if one is willing to take a chance, I 
should say that of all the countries of eastern Eu¬ 
rope, Czechoslovakia was the best risk. 

The main element of risk—and I do not claim that 
it is a great one—lies in the selfishness displayed by 
the Czechs of Bohemia in their relations with the 
Slovaks and in the unconciliatory attitude they have 
displayed toward the Hungarians. The question of 
the relations between the Czechs and their Slovak 
partners is, however, a purely domestic one, and, 
given time, plus forbearance on both sides, it will, 
I imagine, eventually work itself out to their mutual 
satisfaction. 

The problem presented by the Hungarian mi¬ 
nority is a far more serious one. Even if a sincere 
attempt is made to conciliate these people, I do not 
believe that they can ever be assimilated success- 


84 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


fully, for they are of a wholly different breed and 
have different traditions. Moreover, they are fully 
as patriotic as the Czechs themselves. Despite all 
efforts to denationalize them, they remain passionately 
devoted to the country from which they were torn. 

This being so, they promise to remain a thorn 
in the side of Czechoslovakia, a source of trouble 
and of danger. Furthermore, now that the hatreds 
engendered by the war are dying down, public 
opinion everywhere is coming to recognize the fun¬ 
damental injustice and unwisdom of imposing an 
alien yoke on any people, or fraction of a people, 
against their will, particularly when that people has 
some justification for claiming that it is being sub¬ 
jected to persecution and opprt ssion. 

By maintaining its rule over the former Hun¬ 
garian areas along the north bank of the Danube, 
where the Magyar population forms an almost solid 
block, CzechoSiOvakia assures itself of a strong 
military frontier—though our ideas of what consti¬ 
tutes a defensible frontier must be radically revised 
in these days of long-range guns and three-hundred- 
miles-an-hour airplanes—and it also retains control 
of some useful railways and valuable coal mines. 
But are military frontiers and railways and coal 
mines actually worth what it costs in armies and 
anxieties to hold them? That is a question which 
merits the most serious consideration. 

Yet on this subject the Czechs have thus far stub¬ 
bornly refused to listen to reason, even when the 


85 



THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


arguments for a change in their attitude have been 
advanced by their friends. Their frontiers were 
fixed at the Trianon for all time, they assert, and in 
their refusal to consider any revision they are ada¬ 
mant. Their uncompromising attitude is doubtless 
attributable to the fact that just at present they are 
considerabiv ‘^above themselves.” But such a frame 
of mind is hardly surprising in a people who ob¬ 
tained their independence so recently, so suddenly, 
almost without a blow, who have had good fortune 
literally thrust upon them. 

Nothing is farther from my desire than to make 
an offensive comparison, but the intransigent atti¬ 
tude of the Bohemian Czechs calls to mind a young 
American whom I encountered some years ago in a 
Paris restaurant. He had recently come into a for¬ 
tune which, together with the fact that he was un¬ 
accustomed to champagne, led him to show a marked 
lack of consideration for the other diners. 

“Quiet down, Bill,” one of his companions ad¬ 
jured him. “You’re making altogether too much 
noise. You can’t run this place, you know. The peo¬ 
ple here won’t stand for it.'’ 

“To hell with them!” the youngster retorted, bel¬ 
ligerently. “I’m sitting on top of the world. I’ve 
got money and I’ve got a pull and I’m ready to fight 
any one who objects to my enjoying myself So let's 
open another bottle. Come on, now 1 Be a bohemian 1” 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


No one, I suppose, believes that the present situa¬ 
tion in the valley of the Danube can endure, that 
the “settlement’’ made at the Trianon will last very 
long. It is true that Hungary is dismembered, dis¬ 
armed, encircled by powerful enemies—but she is 
potentially dangerous to the peace of the world 
nevertheless. A nation with a grievance is always a 
source of danger, particularly if its grievance is jus¬ 
tified. The lessons of history cannot saiely be ig¬ 
nored. Her oppression of subject peoples cost Spam 
an empire. Russia’s repressive measures in Roland 
precipitated a whole series of bloody revolutions. 
Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine made La 
Revanche a French hope and watchword for half 
a century. Austria’s oppression of her Italian minor¬ 
ities caused Italy to break the Triple Alliance and 
enter the war on the side of the allies, lurkey’s 
treatment of the Greeks and Armenians aroused 
world-wide mdignation. Yet now, after a war which 
was waged to abolish such abuses, two nations which 
gave but negligible aid to the allied cause have been 
permitted to create terrae irredentae within their 
borders and thereby lay the foundations for another 
war. 

The more carefully the facts of the situation are 
studied the pLiner it appears that in the near future 
the map of central Euiope must be redrawn. The 
danger is that if this is delayed too long the redraw¬ 
ing will be done with the bayonet instead oi with the 
pen. Yet I have tried to make it amply clear that, in 


87 



THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


my opinion, nothinj^ is farther from the intention of 
the Hungarian Government than to itself precipitate 
another conflict. Under the stern super vis on of 
Admiral Hoith^ and Count Bethlen, Hungary has 
gotten down to hard work; thinks to the sound ad¬ 
vice of an American, Mr. Jeremiah Smith, she has 
been amazingly successful in rehabilitating her 
finances and putting her house in order. None of the 
succession states can say as much. 

But it is entirely conceivable ihat a situation might 
arise which would force the Government to yield to 
popular opinion. Or, which is more likely, events 
might so shape themselves that bungary, merely by 
remaining neutral, could command her own price, 
for she occupies a position of enormous strategic 
importance at the crossroads oi Europe. A war be¬ 
tween Italy and Yugoslavia, a revo.ution in Ru¬ 
mania, a Russian attempt to regain Bessarabia, a 
split between Czechs and Slovaks, a clash in Albania, 
another Communist rising in Austria—any of these 
may come suddenly, at any moment, and any of them 
might give Hungary her chance. 

I have it on the word of men who are exceptionally 
well informed—foreign military observers for the 
most part—that there is no justification for the asser¬ 
tions so frequently made by the Governments of the 
Little Entente that Hungary is secretly preparing 
for ano her war and consequently needs close watch¬ 
ing. Such an assertion in nonsensical on the face of 
it. As a matter of fact, owing to dissatisfaction with 


88 


THE DANGER ON THE DANUBE 


the prescribed term of enlistment—all recruits must 
consent to serve for a minimum period of twelve con¬ 
secutive years - Hungary has experienced consider¬ 
able difficulty in keeping her military establishment 
up to the strength permitted her under the treaty— 
35,000 men. Fu therxiore, she has no organized re¬ 
serves, no heavy artillery, indeed, little artillery of 
any description, ro tanks, no airplanes. Yet, in order 
to protect themselves against this defenseless state, 
smaller in area than Indiana and smaller than New 
York in population, the Litile Entente deems it 
necessary to keep under arms nearly half a million 
men. 

The truth of the matter is that by means of skil- 
fu’ly directed propaganda, on which they are spend¬ 
ing enormous sums, the governments of the Little 
Entente have succeeded in lulling western Europe 
into a sense of false security, in blinding American 
eyes to what is really going on in the Danube basin. 
By their g eed and oppression Rumania and Czecho¬ 
slovakia have created on the banks of the Danube 
two new Alsace Lorraines. If the allies and the 
League of Nations continue to neglect these fester¬ 
ing sores, then nothing is more certain than that 
war-fever will set in. Unless the voice of western 
public opinion makes itself heard before it is too 
late, unless the doctors at Geneva are prompt to 
take remedial measures Europe will have another 
war on its hands. 



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